Shit Happens
I just got the thumbs-up from David Coady on my proposed contribution to a special issue of Episteme he’s editing on the epistemology of conspiracy theories. The title, “Shit Happens,” comes from, among other places, an epigraph in Brian Keeley’s J. Phil. article “Of Conspiracy Theories.” My article should be of interest to Brain Hammer readers interested in the function and evolution of folk-psychology.
Here’s the abstract:
In this paper embrace what Brian Keeley calls in “Of Conspiracy Theories” the absurdist horn of the dilemmma for philosophers who criticize such “theories”. I thus defend the view that there is indeed something deeply epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorizing: conspiracy theories over-extend intentional explanation and attribute reason where reason does not apply. Along the way I explore some of the cognitive bases for the kind of totalizing intentional explanation of which conspiricay theories are but one instance (much religious thinking constitutes further instances). I speculate as to the evolutionary basis of such explanations. The evolutionary origins of intentional explanation, and thus the niche for which they were adapted, concern tracking relatively small numbers of agents in relatively small social dominance hierarchies. But attempts to apply reason-based explanations to numbers of agents approaching global scales over large chunks of history is as inappropriate as applying them to inanimate objects. Nonetheless, the urge to do so–the urge to theorize conspiritorily–is itself in need of an explanation and I explore what cognitive or psychological factors might underly this urge.