Possibilia

 

 

Respond to the Argument

Over the next few lessons, we're going to look at methods for how to engage in a dynamic argument, back-and-forth argumentation in an effort to learn what the (likely) truth is about some subject. This process involves respecting your interlocutor (i.e., the person you're speaking with) with the hopes that you might collectively learn from each other. This is a process, by the way, that is sometimes called dialectic. At the same time, however, we will be looking at some ways to not(!) argue. The first half of the next few lessons then will cover methods for engaging in dialectic, while the second half will cover bad ways to reason—if you can even call it "reasoning."

I'll be using Lyon and Ward's The New Critical Thinking for the next few lessons. Let me begin with two points that they make about dialectics (p. 327-328). First off, it looks like any kind of constructive argumentation is nearly entirely absent from public discourse. As the authors say, things are looking "abysmal". As it turns out, there is evidence that liberals and conservatives will think they disagree with each other even when they don't really disagree with each other—I'm not kidding (see Mason 2018). All this to say, even if you learn the methods that I'm going to outline here, I'm making no promises. It takes two to tango, and if the person you're having a conversation with doesn't play along and try to engage with your argument constructively, then nothing positive will arise from the exchange. Sorry.

Second, dialectic isn't always what is called for. There are many exchanges that we have with others on a daily basis that are not really for the sake of jointly discovering the truth. It's just two people letting the other talk, basically. This is completely acceptable and serves as a good example of when dialectic is not what is called for. You can call this type of thing "polite conversation". Here's a little sample. Someone will mention something about, say, the governor. This person who's doing the talking about the governor expects of the other person to say something like, "Yeah, totally" or "I know! Crazy, right?" Occasionally, the second person will even say something that they know about the governor. (Gasp!) And then they both say, "Cool" or high five, or whatever. Typical water-cooler conversation. That's completely okay. Not every conversation has to be deep. In fact, preferably, most conversations should not be deep. But(!) you should be prepared for when you can have some serious talk. And in that spirit. Let's move on to how to engage in dynamic argumentation.

The First Golden Rule of Constructive Argumentation:
Respond to the Argument

This is probably not news to you by this point: if you want to engage in productive dynamic argumentation, then you need to actually respond to what your interlocutor is saying. Even better, respond to their argument with objections tailored specifically to the points that they made. This is actually harder to do than you might imagine. This is for many reasons. First off, during dynamic argumentation, tempers may flare and you might get emotional. Moreover, you have higher standards for views that you don't agree with than for views you do agree with (Nisbett and Ross 1980). So the points that your opponent makes might not even seem like good points to you, and so you'll dismiss them without really responding to them (or even processing them). So, slow down and really think about how to object. Lyons and Ward (p. 329-334) give some examples of how this might go. Consider this exchange:

In this exchange, we see Ted serving up an argument (albeit not in our preferred standard form). His conclusion is, "The best way to improve the economy is to reduce taxes on the wealthy." Caitlyn, however, seems to not have engaged directly with the argument. Maybe you agree with the general spirit of her position. But we have to be clear that she did not say anything that directly undermined Ted's argument. Maybe she was working towards a moral argument (about the rich having more than they need already). But this would be a case of not responding to the argument. Instead, it would be avoiding the argument and giving another argument in return.

Here's another way the conversation could've gone:

Caitlyn is doing better in this exchange. She is in the very least explicitly disagreeing with Ted's conclusion. This is a good start. But(!) she is not undermining any of the premises that led to that conclusion. She is once again making a wholly new argument—this time using historical data. This might be a good argument, just like the moral argument from earlier might've been a good one. But she's not first engaging with Ted's argument. Lyons and Ward stress that this is a very important point. You must first directly undermine your opponent's line of reasoning and then(!) propose an argument for your position.

Here's one more way the exchange could've gone:

Now we're talking! She directly challenged the support that Ted gave for his conclusion. Ted makes the bold claim that investments from the rich are the primary drivers of the economy—emphasis added. To this, Caitlyn responded that rich investors are actually rather unlikely to invest in the domestic economy, opting instead to park their profits in an off-shore bank account, or invest in emerging economies, or build a factory in a country where they can get cheap labor, or whatever. Now whether these claims are true or not is besides the point right now. Of course, they are important. But the main message here is about having constructive exchanges. And with regards to that, Caitlyn did great. The authors summarize the lesson.

Well said, fellas. And speaking of moving targets...

 

 

Argument Extraction

 

 

 

On what is possible

Why conspiracies

There are various reasons why we should focus on conspiracy theories in a critical thinking course. First and foremost in my mind is this false notion that distrusting authorities as a matter of course is a form of critical thinking. (This idea was put forward to me on various ocassions, including one very long plane ride circa 2017.) In any case, let me give you my views on this here and defend myself below. Put bluntly, blanket disbelief of any claims made by authorities is not critical thinking. Moreover, being a contrarian and just disbelieving everything you hear is also not critical thinking. Critical thinking is having a method for separating what’s likely to be true from what’s not likely to be true; and it's paying attention to one’s own thought process (something known as meta-cognition) and how it might affect the processing of information. It's also, I might add, keeping up-to-date with the latest science.¹

Having said that, it's also not critical thinking to just deny the truth of every conspiracy theory as a matter of course, since sometimes conspiracies are true. That is to say, sometimes individuals do secretly collude so as to bring about some outcome. (Stay tuned.) So, not only do we need a method for distinguishing between what's like true and what's likely not true, but we also need to steer clear of what Juha Räikä and Lee Basham (2019) call conspiracy theory phobia, the instinctive pathologizing or hostility towards conspiracy theories. This attitude is just as epistemically unjustified as the instinct to readily accept any and all conspiracy theories. Put differently, neither accepting conspiracy theories blindly nor denying conspiracy theories blindly is critical thinking. As the authors summarize: “Both ends of the spectrum are irrational in the sense that they have a tendency to accept or reject conclusions based on predispositions rather than evidence” (p. 181; emphasis added). In effect, immediate dismissal of the views of a conspiracy theorist amounts to something like an ad hominem fallacy: an attack on the arguer rather than the argument.

There are other reasons, of course, for why a critical thinker should pay attention to conspiracy theories (and those that believe them). In particular, we've seen some pretty dramatic effects of belief in conspiracy theories, such as what I call the Capitol Hill Putsch. As I see it, people that believe (without evidence and with plenty of evidence to the contrary) in widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election deciding that storming the Capitol was a good idea, and some even carried zip-ties presumably for taking hostages. I'm not sure what these individuals would've done had they actually taken a congressperson hostage, but I do know that, throughout the world and throughout history, conspiracies and conspiracy theories are ubiquitous. Uscinski, political scientists and expert on conspiracy theories, explains the negative consequences of blindly believing conspiracy theories about, say, whether or not genetically modified foods (GMOs) are safe or not:

GMOs are, by the way, perfectly safe (Hollingworth et al. 2003). Despite their safety, however, many around the world—including some in the United States—distrust GMOs and believe in conspiracy theories about them. Conspiratorial thinking about other things is widespread as well. Medicine is a case in point. As many as 300,000 have died in Africa due to conspiracy theories suggesting that medicines for preventing AIDS are part of a global conspiracy to reduce the continent’s population (Uscinski 2019: 11). Here's an American example. Portland residents blocked a bill that would add fluoride to their water supply, believing (falsely) that fluoride is a method of pacifying the population to make them more controllable (Uscinski 2019: 11-12). In fact, federal-level policies that are still with us today have belief in some conspiracy theories lurking around in their origins.²

So, conspiratorial thinking is widespread. Even Presidents engage in it. Most concerningly, those most likely to believe in conspiracy theories are also more likely to support violence against the government while simultaneously opposing gun control. In fact, conspiratorial thinkers even accept that it is justified to engage in conspiracies themselves to achieve goals (Uscinski 2019: 13). In other words, they believe in conspiracies without evidence and at the same time feel that it's ok to engage in conspiracies themselves, if the cause is worth it. The Capitol Hill Putsch is a perfect example: this is a recipe for disaster.

Let's narrow the scope a bit and focus only on the United States. Kathryn Olmstead (2019) gives some highlights.

1. Most Americans believe in conspiracies. 55% believe in at least one; 27% believe in two; 12% believe in three or more.
2. Both sides of the political aisle believe in conspiracies. Partisans are typically more likely to believe the other side is conspiring, obviously. So, if you are a Republican, you tend to believe Democrats are conspiring and up to no good. You are also more likely to believe in conspiracies if your side just recently lost an election, as what happened in 2020. (Note that Olmstead published her work before the 2020 election and thus before the Capitol Hill Putsch.)
3. Wording matters. Respondents to surveys gauging for conspiratorial thinking are more likely to say they believe in a conspiracy if the question includes partisan clues—surprise, surprise. In other words, if you blatantly give the subject political cues, as in explicitly mentioning the other party(!), then they are more likely to admit they believe in conspiracy theories. Respondents are also more likely to admit believing a conspiracy if they are given a scale of belief, rather than a “yes” or “no” option. So, if given an option to say they "partially agree", subjects who would've answered "no" in a "yes" or "no" format will in fact admit to believing in conspiracy theories.
4. Conspiratorial thinking is very much like an ideology. This is to say that if you believe in one conspiracy, you are likely to believe in multiple conspiracies, even if they are inconsistent(!). For example, if you believe that Princess Diana's death was part of a murder plot (as opposed to a car accident), then you are also more likely to believe she is still alive(!). This shows that some have a clear preference for conspiratorial thinking.
5. Conspiratorial thinking is politically disruptive. Partisans are less likely to accept the outcomes of an election. They are more likely to oppose policies put forward by "the other side", thinking them part of a plot. And they are more likely to engage in political violence.

Clearly, critical thinkers need to take conspiratorial thinking seriously.

Types of conspiracies

Not all conspiracies are the same. In Lecture 2 of his Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories, science writer, historian of science, and founder of The Skeptics Society Michael Shermer discusses some classification schemes for conspiracy theories. For example, you might lump them by perpetrator: conspiracies perpetrated by the government, non-whites, the Jews, etc. However, we can agree with Shermer that this classification scheme is not very helpful.

Per Shermer, a more helpful scheme is the one proposed by Jesse Walker in his 2013 The United States of Paranoia, Walker classifies conspiracy theories into five categories:

1. Enemies without: These are foreign agents. Think Russia meddling in US elections, the USA plotting the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (see the lesson titled The One Great Thing (Pt. I)), etc.
2. Enemies within: These are typically referred to as fifth columnists. Think US citizens trying to overthrow their own government.
3. Enemy above: This is the elite plotting control of the general population. This is the type of conspiratorial thinking that Chomsky has been accused of (see the lesson titled A Certain Sort of Story).
4. Enemy below: This kind of thinking occurs when the elite think the poor are plotting against them (see Footnote 5 in the lesson titled Fragility).
5. Benevolent: This is admittedly a rare kind of conspiracy theory. This is when someone believes that there is someone conspiring for the greater good.

Shermer also mentions that classification scheme given in A Culture of Conspiracy by political scientist Michael Barkun (2003). Barkun classifies conspiracy theories into three categories:

1. Events (e.g., JKF assassination)
2. Systemic (e.g., conspiracies involving social control, political power, and even world domination)
3. Super-conspiracies (e.g., conspiracies involving a single individual or force that controls everything)

To these classification schemes, I'd like to add the concept of cocked up conspiracies. These are official state operations that are bungled so badly that it looks like a secret plot. In other words, these are government policies that were executed so poorly that it truly looks like it had to have been planned to happen the way it did, i.e., like a conspiracy. I, unfortunately, cannot take credit for this wonderful concept. The credit goes to the journalist Ioan Grillo, who labels two operations during the War on Drugs as cocked up conspiracies. Here's the story.

In chapter 8 of his 2021 Blood Gun Money, Grillo discusses Operation Wide Receiver and Operation Fast and Furious, two operations that were bungled so badly and led to so few arrests (while simultaneously giving quality weapons to Mexican cartels!) that some civilian assets actually speculated that it was all a secret plot to convince the American public that assault rifles should be banned. The general idea was this. You first "walk the guns", that is sell the guns to lower-level members of the cartels, and then track them over time to try to get at cartel members higher up in the chain of command. However, to say that it didn't go as planned is an understatement. First and foremost, very few indictments came of the operations. Shockingly, most weapons sold to cartel members have not been recovered. Make sure you understand that. The US government sold high-grade weapons to drug cartels and then lost track of them. To further show how bungled the strategy was, consider this. The Fast and Furious operation in particular had an instance where a known cartel member bought 700 weapons(!) in Phoenix for half a million dollars(!) without being stopped when crossing the border(!). Who thought that was a good idea? All in all, Grillo comments that it’s hard to track what really happened in Fast and Furious because there are “overlapping fuck ups going in multiple directions.”

Here's another example of a cocked up conspiracy. In chapter 2 of Chasing the Scream, journalist Johann Hari discusses the story of Henry Smith Williams. Here's a little context. In the early 20^th century, the Harrison Act was signed into law. This law banned the sale of opiates, but it had a loophole in it that allowed doctors to prescribe opiates to addicts as part of their recovery (so as to avoid something called dopesickness). However, Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, took it upon himself to wage a personal war on drugs, using the institution he had been put in charge of like a weapon. Among other things, Anslinger targeted doctors that were protected by the Harrison Act and arrested over 20,000 of them, some of which faced jail time (even though they had broken no laws and just tried to help their patients curb addiction). These arrests, by the way, included Henry Smith Williams’ doctor brother, Edward Williams. In any case, the dynamics of the drug criminalization imposed by Anslinger led to two crime waves. First, addicts sought their drugs through non-legal channels, thereby giving rise to a black market controlled by the mafia. Second, the mafia price gouged (i.e., dramatically raised the price), and so addicts had to revert to stealing in order to have enough money for their fix. This all seemed to Smith Williams to implicate Anslinger as a stooge of the mafia. In other words, Anslinger's war on drugs had such negative consequences, effectively empowering the mafia and causing a crime wave, that Williams thought it had to be the case that Anslinger actually worked for the mafia(!)—a top-notch conspiracy. Needless to say, Henry Smith Williams was ultimately wrong. Per Hari, if Anslinger had any links to the mafia, they surely would’ve been known by now—but none were ever found. Now that's a cocked up conspiracy!

So those are some reasons for taking conspiracy theories seriously and some ways of classifying conspiracies. But what gives rise to conspiratorial thinking and how do we prevent it? Stay tuned.

 

 

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To be continued...

 

FYI

Suggested Reading: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Conspiracy Theories

TL;DR: The School of Life, How to Resist Conspiracy Theories

Supplemental Material—

• Video: Pitzer College, Joseph Uscinski: "Conspiracy Theories are for Losers"

Related Material—

• Reading: PBS News Hour, ‘Fast and Furious’ Gun Operation Provokes Outrage in Mexico

Advanced Material—

• Reading: Karen Douglas et al., Understanding Conspiracy Theories

 

Footnotes

1. It was actually Karl Popper, whose theory of falsification we met in ...for the Stronger, that coined the term “conspiracy theory of society.” He did so in his Conjectures and Refutations. Popper believed conspiracy theories were inherently unscientific, since they generally couldn't be falsified, although modern researchers are challenging this claim, since some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true (see chapter 2 of Uscinski 2019). Some modern researchers recommend assessing each theory on a case-by-case basis (ibid., p. 39).

2. Here's a fascinating example of conspiratorial thinking having a massive impact on history. In chapter 4 of The Red Flag, Priestland gives an account of Stalinism (the name for the governing policies which were implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin) and how it came about. In particular, Stalin returned Russia from Lenin’s more pragmatic type of Marxism to a revolutionary, military-style Marxism. Several factors led to the rise and stabilization of Stalinism, including (but not limited to): a Bolshevik party culture of conspiracy(!), the uncertainty created by civil war, disappointment with Lenin’s New Economic Policy, and the constant threat of foreign invasion. Even if all that conspiratorial thinking did was influence the type of government that the USA faced off against during the Cold War, we would have to study it (just to understand that massive conflict). Of course, conspiratorial thinking has done much more than that.