Changing Definitions

"There is evidence that some conspiracy theorists are, in fact, mentally unstable."

There's PROOF that many anti-conspiracy theorists are mentally unstable. ;)

Seriously, I've been doing some research on the body of medical literature that has grown up around conspiracy, and it's a dream come true for fallacy sleuths. One of my favorites:

A person who believes in one conspiracy theory is likely to believe in another.

Like what kind of fruit cake would believe just one conspiracy ever took place?

There's PROOF that many anti-conspiracy theorists are mentally unstable. ;)

Please provide evidence of "Proof", otherwise this can be dismissed as a Tu Quque (ad hominem) fallacy

Anyway, we're getting more into the areas of cognitive biases than logical fallacies.  As Dr. Bo points out there must be a deception to qualify for the latter.  Are you implying that Alex Jones is just as rational and logical as The Amazing Randi?  Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on par with Hume, Michael Shermer, or Daniel Dennett? This is why specificity rather than sweeping generalities is the more valid epistemology. 

Hume's razor can be applied here:  “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless that testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”

While conspiracy theorizing may rarely bear some fruit, it is probably not the best methodology for discerning the truth or falsity of a matter.  

As Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, asked: “Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of the miracle tells a lie.”…

If you're suggesting Alex Jones is as big a kook as Michael Sherman, I couldn't agree more. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with Randi, Greene or the others.

An example of a credible conspiracy analyst would be the group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, or the "Truthers" in general.

People's brains have gotten so scrambled by all the bogus definitions, they don't even realize what conspiracy is. It's almost another word for corruption. Corrupt politicians, corporate tycoons, etc., don't do their dirty work in public. They plot their schemes behind closed doors.

Conspiracy is even a legal term. Newspapers are essentially conspiracy clusters. I've had a lot of experience with the media, and no one described them better than Hunter S. Thompson.

Your Thomas Paine quote about "millions of lies" is right on target. It sometimes seems like there are more lies than truth out there.

If you're suggesting Alex Jones is as big a kook as Michael Sherman, I couldn't agree more. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with Randi, Greene, or the others.

It's Shermer and not Sherman.

Alex Jones is a kook, a fraud, and a mountebank.

Exposing Alex Jones as a dangerous kook is crucial. Margaret Sullivan The Washington Post

https://www.denverpost.com/2017/06/14/exposing-alex-jones-as-a-dangerous-kook-is-crucial-but-megyn-kellys-interview-isnt-the-way/ via @denverpost   

Dr. Michael Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members.

Ouch, I think I just spotted a fallacy...

Shermer's club has 55,000 members. Alex Jones probably has far more fans than that. So using that logic, he wins.

But I've investigated both of them, and they're both idiots. The sad thing is that there are literally millions of U.S. citizens who are so brain-dead they obediently follow people like Alex Jones and Michael Shermer.

Also, I wouldn't quote anyone from The Washington Post to make a point. The media are pretty much in the same boat as Jones and Shermer. Then again, The Washington Post no longer has Bill Gates' wife and business partner on its board of directors. It's also now owned by Jeff Bezos, which pretty much sinks that ship.

[To WebRanger]

Yes, that would be the ad numerum fallacy (appeal to popularity). Nice catch. There also something here about relativity. What I mean is a number like 55,000 sounds huge and creates the intended submissive effect in an argument -- until we ask, Compared to what? People who aren't skeptical (of God) number in the billions.

Or reverse it. I've often argued that faith and science are not inherently contradictory, and that this is evidenced by the 2,000 active members of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), a 75-year-old network of Christians in the sciences. But it would be fair to argue, Compared to what? Scientists who don't believe in God easily outnumber the faithful.

Moving on, the bigger problem with citing The Washington Post as a source of reliable information is not ownership but the transparently partisan nature of the publication (and, in this case, the author). This is true of most legacy media today, unfortunately. Citing CNN, the Washington Post or the New York Times was once possible since no one would seriously dispute the authority or objectivity of these sources. Today, sadly, it's akin to citing Fox News, the New York Post or the Epoch Times. Of course, this raises a larger question: Was it ever logically valid to cite mainstream media in support of an argument? Perhaps such arguments were always ad verecundiam (appeal to authority) arguments and the trick is just more obvious in these hyper-partisan times.

Returning to the topic, you have both identified the problem with loaded terms like "conspiracy theorist." I submit that this is the heart of the fallacies that involve shifting definitions to fit an argument (e.g. definist fallacy, ambiguity fallacy, appeal to definition). Let's play with the latter and attempt to use the dictionary to settle the dispute.

According to Webster, a conspiracy theorist is someone who believes "a secret of great importance is being kept from the public." That would seem to support mchasewalker's argument. For instance, investigative journalists believed this about Watergate -- and they were right! A conspiracy theorist is not necessarily a kook.

But then Webster's give its first example: Person X is "best known for … his conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of reptilian humanoids is running the world." This is where it becomes clear why the previous argument fails and why using the dictionary is problematic. The denotative meaning does not consider the connotative meaning. When someone is accused of being a conspiracy theorist, we think reptilian humanoids, not Woodward & Bernstein.

Yes, the dictionaries began posting wacko definitions of "conspiracy theory" in relatively recent years.

I'm actually working on a book about conspiracy, and I was surprised to discover that the first and only notable philosopher who discussed it was apparently Macchiavelli. Some time after World War II a "philosopher" named Karl Popper began writing some really deranged stuff about it. He clearly wasn't qualified to be called a philosopher.

More recently, there was a sudden explosion of interest in conspiracy theory, with a flurry of self-professed philosophers and scientists writing the kookiest stuff. Like the physics major who claims he created a formula that can predict when someone will spill the beans on a particular conspiracy theory - to the nearest three days no less.

There are some serious games I'm going on, and it blows my mind that virtually no philosophers, fallacy fans, etc. seem to have a clue.

By the way, I wrote FIVE separate chapters about the definitions of the terms conspire, conspiracy and conspiracy theory in my book. That's how wacky things are.

See my note on WebRanger's reply. Thanks for stimulating me to think further about these matters!

Nature is always going off course, it just usually isn't as pretty as miracles are.  Not very reasonable our Thomas Paine, who is also dead which proves that his own nature was capable of going off course.  Sceptics are scarcely rational or logical, they just have a compulsion to disbelieve in people whom they consider inferior in order to assert their superiority over them; they will resort to complete unreason before they ever admit the people they look down on may be correct. 

On what basis did we conclude that miracles were uncommon to begin with?  Terms like 'miraculous' are loaded by our prior assumptions about the nature of the world.  If we start with the assumption of a non-miraculous universe and then demand a very high burden of proof to prove the existence of miracles, of course we end up proving our assumption of a non-miraculous universe. 

Conspiracy theory is not really a useful concept.  The reason is that the term conspiracy can incorporate any scale of conspiracy.  A small scale conspiracy involving a few number of elite, well-connected individuals for limited ends is just history.  A large scale conspiracy involving vast secret societies spanning continents and centuries for grand ends is clearly conspiracy theorizing.  The problem here is at what point does a small-scale conspiracy become large enough that talking about it becomes a conspiracy theory.

The basic problem with conspiracy theories is simply logistics.  Secretive organizations find it difficult to organize large-scale operations while maintaining both their internal unity and their secrecy (they are normally organized into cells, which do not have much contact with each-other, making splits easy to arrange).  In effect something becomes a conspiracy theory at the point that logistics render that kind of organization implausible. 

Except that runs into the problem that this is relative to social conditions.  A highly hierarchical setup reduces the logistics cost of a conspiracy provided it is among those near the top of the hierarchy.  Also a wide amount of scepticism regarding conspiracy theories makes secrecy easier to maintain, reducing the secrecy logistics cost. 

Interesting comments. Thanks.

Sure thing. I enjoy thinking about these things.

By the way, this is the most common obstacle to productive debates that I encounter. There is nothing more frustrating that someone who constantly attacks straw-man versions of your argument and then, when you point it out, uses redefinition as a defense. "But you said X and X means [something X does not actually mean]." :-)