#ucts

The rejection of the conspiratorial world view, however, is not something about which I am particularly thrilled. If conspiracy theories are genuinely misguided, then I fear we are left with an apparently absurdist image of the world. A lone gunman can change the course of history when the U. S. President just happens to drive past the window of his place of work during the gunman's lunch hour. The conspiratorial world view offers us the comfort of knowing that while tragic events occur, they at least occur for a reason, and that the greater the event, the greater and more significant the reason.

...the challenge of conspiracy theory is that it forces us to choose between an almost nihilistic degree of skepticism and absurdism: the conspiracy theorist chooses to embrace the hyperskepticism inherent in supposing dissimulation on a truly massive scale (by distrusting the claims of our institutions) over the absurdism of an irrational and essentially meaningless world. Until a third option is presented–and perhaps this is one of the jobs of philosophy–we should expect UCTs to continue to enjoy significant popularity.

Conspiracy theorists are, I submit, some of the last believers in an ordered universe. By supposing that current events are under the control of nefarious agents, conspiracy theories entail that such events are capable of being controlled.

The definition of conspiracy theory poses unexpected difficulties. There seems to exist a strong, common intuition that it is possible to delineate a set of explanations–let us call them unwarranted conspiracy theories (UCTs). It is thought that this class of explanation can be distinguished analytically from those theories which deserve our assent. The idea is that we can do with conspiracy theories what David Hume did with miracles: show that there is a class of explanations to which we should not assent, by definition.