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Clarke questions the efficacy of government efforts at “cognitive infiltration” on two grounds. First, conspiracy theorists “are able to explain away (to their own satisfaction at least) … alternative viewpoints.” Second, government involvement may only “strengthen … the case for there being government cover-ups of conspiracies.”

I think the first reason is not unique to conspiracy theorists. Competent advocates of substantive positions, if presented with an alternative, generally come up with explanations for why some people believe the alternative. This is true even of mainstream viewpoints. So for example, naturalistic evolutionary biologists generally have explanations for why some dissenters accept the theory of intelligent design. These explanations account for (to their own satisfaction) the beliefs of opponents.

Thus, I would replace Clarke’s first reason with the following. Conspiracy theorists are part of a broader subset of theorists, which is just the group of theorists who hold positions contrary to the consensus of experts in the relevant domains (9/11 – engineers, demolition experts; design – biologists; JFK assassination – historians? Feel free to make suggestions here; etc.). It is worth noting that mainstream consensus may constitute a “conspiracy” – 9/11 is a case in point, as the plot to bring down the towers by crashing airplanes into them was as surely a conspiracy as anything.

Let’s call such theorists Gadfly Theorists. Gadfly theorists are more irksome than mere gadflies because they have developed fairly coherent, rigorous accounts to support their theories. Yet they remain gadflies because they are bucking the theoretical status quo – the consensus of experts. So why will government infiltration fail to convince Gadfly Theorists and their many Internet followers? It is not just because they can explain away the opposition – anyone can do that. Rather, it is because they have abandoned a crucial adjudicating procedure in empirical inquiry – respect for the relevant scholarly community. Typically, minority opinions are led by a few people with approximately relevant credentials (e.g. Behe for Intelligent Design; Richard Gage for 9/11 controlled demolition theory), and then legions of non-specialists who have accepted their minority views. What Sunstein thinks the government should try to combat are the legions of non-specialists, who traffic mostly on the Internet.

But I submit that this is impossible, because the reasons for non-specialist non-mainstream belief are, at bottom, mysterious. I do not know of any general rational way of acquiring beliefs in areas I am not expert in other than absorbing and then accepting the consensus of experts. If someone denies, say, a principle of particle physics, I can’t imagine any possible rational grounds according to which I could adopt the denial as my own, apart from becoming an expert and reaching the same conclusion independently.

In my own experience, this is born out quite consistently. Those of my non-expert friends who are nevertheless followers of Gadfly Theorists (perhaps they should be called Lay Gadfly Theorists… Gadflay Theorists?) have, for reasons fundamentally mysterious to me, deferred to experts who go against expert consensus. The typical progression of a conversation with Gadflay Theorist is as follows:

(1) Gadflay makes non-mainstream claim X.
(2) Consensus Joe asks, “But why should I reject the consensus?”
(3) As evidence, Gadlfay cites the set of all arguments for non-mainstream claim X.
(4) Consensus Joe picks one argument from (3) at random, finds publicly available thorough rejection of claim in relevant expert community, shows his lay research results to Gadflay.
(5a) Gadflay re-cites the set of all arguments, but minus argument addressed in (4)
or
(5b) Gadflay explains away expert rejection via additional non-mainstream claim X1 (e.g., experts are involved in a cover-up)
or
(5c) Gadflay simply refuses to accept consensus opinion over authorities which give him the evidence in (3)
or
(5d) Gadflay cites a response from a favored Gadfly Theorist to the evidence cited in (4).

To me, 5a-5d all constitute the destruction of a rational engagement between Consensus Joe and Gadflay. I’ll go through why I think this, in order:

(5a) This route is possibly dishonest, and reveals that Gadflay’s goal is really just to find any route, whatever it is, which will convince Consensus Joe of X. Whenever you catch Gadflay doing this, it is important to press Gadflay to say whether he thinks the argument addressed in (4) still stands. For example, one argument given by 9/11 truthers is that there is a broad set of experts who accept the relevant non-mainstream view X. It is fairly easy to show that the movement’s claims in this regard are both baseless, and disturbingly dishonest and manipulative. Gadflay may point out that the Gadfly Theory may still be true, though the movement habitually lies about sources. Remember, Gadflay is correct here, but should nevertheless be pressed to admit that his argument has been weakened. Furthermore, as a matter of encouraging epistemic virtues, one should ask Gadflay to introspect and find out why the defeat of the argument addressed in (4) doesn’t seem to bother him.

(5b) This path will almost certainly result in Gadflay being backed into a corner, at which point he may either resort to (5c) or (5d), or trickily resume with (5a). For example, non mainstream 9/11 theories are notorious for breaking down at the level of their wider implications. Once one backs away from the narrow focus on the web of claims in engineering, it becomes clear that the alternative story doesn’t fit with what we know about the rest of the world. For example, the lack of evidence for the extensive planning and interference required for any controlled demolition hypothesis constitutes a failure for the theory’s implications to obtain. For this reason, many 9/11 truthers, including Richard Gage, make the highly irrational (if prudent) move to avoid non-engineering claims altogether. But once Gadflay has refused to acknowledge the importance of the failure of his theory’s implications to obtain, rational discourse is impossible. So (5b) will probably signal the end of conversation. Alternatively, Gadflay may actually have an additional set of arguments to support X1, at which point the progression restarts. (Note that this move is very suspicious, as it would require the rejection of an additional arena of expert consensus!)

(5c) This move seems to me to be what is really going on in many debates with Gadflays. Because Gadflay is not an expert, he must, at some point, be simply privileging a Gadfly Theorist or small group of Gadfly theorists, over all experts who create consensus. Whether or not he makes this explicit determines whether or not he has given response (5c). We cannot prove Gadflay is thinking in this way, although we could challenge him to show exactly how he is comparing equivalent but contrary claims between experts and Gadfly Theorists. Yet, if expert consensus addresses the relevant issue directly, Gadflay simply must be privileging his theorists over the consensus.

(5d) This is surely the most rational of Gadflay’s options. While it does signal the end of rational discourse, it is not immediately obvious why this should be so. Say the Gadfly Theorists have claimed that the twin towers fell at such-and-such velocity, a claim parroted by Gadlfay in (3). Consensus Joe picks this argument out for (4), and finds that the claim is both inherently ridiculous (perhaps it is based on selective Youtube clips) and widely refuted directly. Gadflay may reply that Gadfly Theorists have changed the claim to something either wholly different, or narrower. For example, perhaps there is one particular angle from which, for a small period of time, a tower appears to be falling at some velocity consistent with controlled demolition. Consensus Joe has two options. First, he may note that the trend seems to be that the Gadfly Theorists move the goalpost, or merely retreat, until further refutation, to non-addressed claims when their original claims are addressed, or construct challenges that are in some way unanswerable (e.g. some inexplicable feature of an enormously complicated event, about which sufficient evidence is just not available). Consensus Joe may say, “This just pisses me off,” and leave. Or, perhaps more cordially, Consensus Joe may attempt to find an instance of this new claim being addressed in the expert literature. If it is addressed, then Consensus Joe may collapse this process into (4), and force Gadflay into (5c). If the new claim is not addressed, then Consensus Joe is in quite the epistemic pickle. He must either find some good explanation for why it is not addressed (perhaps by emailing an expert within the consensus), seek to find an answer on his own (perhaps in the same email, or by becoming an expert himself), or find some reason for not caring. On the latter, there is at least one reason not to care, which is that there are an infinite number of claims not addressed by the scholarly community. Gadfly Theorists must explain why some claim in particular deserves to be addressed. It seems to me that un-addressed bits of evidence are only worthy of being addressed insofar as they either refute the consensus or support an alternative. Thus, my recommendation to Consensus Joe is that he accept that the new retreating un-addressed claim does count as evidence for the Gadfly Theory. He may then move on and continue to discuss X, using the format detailed above. It could be, after all, that the Gadfly Theorists will initiate some sort of paradigm shift, or change very much like it. Presumably Einsteins and Newtons look like Gadfly Theorists, for about three seconds before the scholarly community begins to adopt their non-mainstream views. However, it remains unclear how Gadflay can have any justification for following them before the consensus shifts.

This is a very long post. I have not reviewed it before posting. Any corrections of minor errors, grammatical or otherwise, are appreciated.

Corrections of major errors will be taken with the usual hostility…

Speaking of retiring, philosopher Keith Parsons has undergone a rare line-item retirement from a sub-discipline of philosophy, philosophy of religion. There is a fun discussion at Prosblogion. There is also some discussion by noted autodidact Luke Muehlhauser. And Leiter has put the issue up for discussion. [Update: see also this nice discussion by Bill Vallicella].

Some people have given snobby, even if correct, reactions to this, by saying various things that mean “Who is Keith Parsons anyway?”

What is interesting to me is that this issue is interesting at all. Does it matter if someone thinks some side of a philosophical debate is decisively victorious? That’s a very optimistic assessment of any philosophical position. As a general rule I don’t think the philosophical argumentation of atheistic or theistic philosophy of religion, or any major philosophical discipline, is decisive. On a popular view, when a philosophical position truly wins, it is no longer called philosophy.

One interesting topic to come out of the discussions of Parson’s autobiographical remarks is the distinction between “apologetics” and “philosophical theology.” A useful task of philosophy is the analysis of concepts, and surely a decline in apologetics might see analysis flourish. However, from philosophers like Nicholas Wolterstorff to Richard Swinburne to Marylin Adams, I don’t think either side of this dichotomy has really been ignored. Also, I don’t think philosophy of religion is unique in this regard. We happen to have the cute term philosophical theology to apply to this particular case, but analogous pursuits exist in most other philosophical endeavors. For example, it is only one task of the moral realist to demonstrate or prove or argue that moral properties exist or that moral realism is true. It is another task to analyze and develop what moral realism even is, what moral facts would be like, whether ethics has continuity with empirical science, etc. In fact, we might say that the “apologetic” discipline is only one of many tasks of the moral realist.

There has also been some discussion of the canard about philosophy of religion not being taken “seriously” in the discipline. This common impression is confuted by (1) the number of philosophers who do excellent work in multiple disciplines and take phil religion seriously, (2) the number of peer-reviewed academic presses and journals that publish work in phil religion, and (3) statistics cited at Prosblogion which show more or comparable specialization in phil religion as other subjects such as philosophy of mathematics.

Here is my own discipline-oriented view on philosophy of religion, in a handy list:

(1) Philosophy of religion is an excellent pedagogical tool. Like ethics, it is one of the few areas of philosophy intersecting with real lives of real people (a subset of which are students!), so relevant that many people have already thought about – even thought hard about – issues involved.
(2) Philosophy of religion is quite vast in scope, overlapping with all other disciplines within philosophy. For this reason it is slightly misleading to say one specializes in philosophy of religion generally. Rather, one usually has general competence but has developed in some specific areas: religion and ethics, epistemology of religion, etc.
(3) Philosophy of religion is important for understanding the history of philosophy, as many philosophical pursuits have their origin in religiously-oriented disputes, and certainly in thinkers who are only fully understood in the context of their faith. Some philosophers, e.g. John Hare in ethics, have made efforts to demonstrate the cost of leaving religion out of our interpretation of major thinkers.

So, I think it is a mistake when major universities don’t offer an introductory survey course in philosophy of religion. Philosophy of religion is a good gateway into philosophy more generally. As Neil Tognazzini comments on Leiter, one can introduce major topics through the subject. But even though many major universities don’t offer such a course, that doesn’t mean the subject isn’t taken “seriously.” It just means that about as many people are very interested in it as are interested in philosophy of math, etc.

Not to bore my infinitely large readership, but one last comment I want to make is somewhat anecdotal. In my experience several undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty who don’t list philosophy of religion in their interests or specializations or even competency, nevertheless do have a substantial interest in it, either via their official interests (say, metaphysics) or just non-professionally. As evidence of wide cross-disciplinary interest (or interested disinterest!), see for example these two volumes, Philosophers Without Gods and Philosophers Who Believe.

Joshua Knobe is quoted:

“It seems very puzzling that all we changed was this one word, just changing the word harm to help, and yet we’re now having completely different judgments about whether what he did was intentional or unintentional. Yet it seems like it’s only the moral status of what he did that is changing. … Somehow the moral judgments people are making are affecting their intuitions about something like how the mind works.”

I don’t think this is quite right. There is an apparent substantive moral difference between the two cases. But first, let’s distinguish three morally relevant elements in the scenario. Two elements are each of the effects on the environment – one deleterious, the other beneficial. A third element in the scenario is the attitude of the chairman, which remains the same in both cases. In both cases we could say the chairman is blameworthy in being indifferent to an important effect of his actions. Note that in both scenarios he is willing to harm the environment for company profit.

However, there is another important aspect of the two scenarios. Generally, it is more blameworthy to consciously act immorally than it is praiseworthy to consciously act morally. No one praises a man for not being a rapist, but we do blame a man for being a rapist.

So I think it is this distinction that is at work in the study, which is a good distinction. There is no reason to think, as does Knobe, that respondents are changing their minds about whether an action is “intentional.” What has happened is that the respondents have just been tricked by the curious addition that the chairman is indifferent to the effects of his actions, which makes his character just as evil in both cases. But this is hard for a non-philosopher respondent to pick out, since the scenarios draw special attention to the results of the chairman’s actions. It is relatively trivial that if someone does something evil to achieve an end, they are blameworthy for that action. Whether or not they’ve done the evil “intentionally” is somewhat ambiguous – it does us no good to give people a messy thought experiment. It is also trivial that if I cure cancer incidentally in the process of playing a video game for pleasure, I’m not any more praiseworthy than someone who played the game without curing cancer.

The response seems to me to be reflecting an accurate intuition about this moral difference, not some deep contradiction in folk metaphysics or psychology of intention.

So, like much experimental philosophy, this study teaches us only something very trivial: some thought experiments have subtleties, which you have to think about for more than a second.

UPDATE: Notice that the percentages actually are quite consistent. They are roughly 80% that think he intentionally did something bad in the first case, and 20% that think he did something good in the second. Probably the same 80% voted “no” in the second case, because they recognize, correctly, that the chairman’s apathy with respect to doing evil makes him bad in both cases, and that we are more blameworthy for bad we knowingly do incidentally than we are praiseworthy for good we knowingly do incidentally. This has nothing to do with people’s intuitions about “how the mind works.”