Posts by HORansome
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The first rule of Kiwiblog should be 'Don't comment on Kiwiblog.' The second rule of Kiwiblog should be don't comment on Kiwiblog.
Got to love ambiguity.
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Ah, Affirming the Consequent, the fallacy of choice for cranks everywhere.
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Ah, but, J W, whilst that may be true for propositional truths, it does not entail that beliefs that are ridiculed are true. Only a small subset of ridiculed beliefs will end up being vindicated.
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Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, J W. A lot of the EVP phenomena has been shown to be a psychological artefact on the part of the listener (I'm saying 'a lot' here to be generous/charitable; I've seen no evidence to suggest that there is, actually, uncontroversial evidence of EVP) and thus something that is read into the noise rather than read out of it.
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I do love the 'I'm not a Conspiracy Theorist, but...' routine. Just like the 'I'm not a racist, but...' starter to any sentence, you know what is going to come next will prove otherwise.
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I'm working on a paper at the moment dealing with that kind of issue. Epistemologists tend to define `officialness' in this kind of area as being `a belief founded on good principles, using best inferences, and the like' but the weaker notion of Official persists. For example, can political theories be properly `official' in the rarefied epistemic sense? I don't think they can, but I do think that if given a choice between a political theory and a mere (to say, basically evidence-less) Conspiracy Theory it would be reasonable to go with the political theory, even if it were wrong.
(I was thinking of using Lysenkoism as an example in the paper, as well as the Moscow Trials.)
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I didn't say it was a matter solely to do with Conspiracy Theories; when you have a debate about rival beliefs the radical belief is the one that needs to shoulder the burden of proof. All Conspiracy Theories are are attempts at explanations, and like all attempts at explanations, some are good and some are bad.
With regards to Official Theories, I think I share the same kind of concern you have (if that concern is something like "I'm concerned that a lot of so-called Official Theories are also Conspiracy Theories.") but it's still a useful term to use to demarcate between well-accepted explanations and their conspiratorial rivals.
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I also don't really think that the conspiracy theorists do have to prove that their conspiracy is correct to be of interest, because merely disproving the official theory is actually very very important. See again the Show Trials.
I agree, but when a Conspiracy Theory challenges a widely-accepted and argued for Official Theory, it is up the Conspiracy Theorist to do the work. The example I like to use is the move from a geocentric to a heliocentic model of the universe; the heliocentrists were right, but they had to show that they were right, using good arguments, inferences and the like. That took a very long time, and it was reasonable for the laity, at the time, to say "But the geocentric model is so well-argued for that it must be the most justifiable position to take."
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The difference, is, though, that suspecting that Conspiracies might be occurring is a very different thing to asserting that they are. To assert that they are you need to shoulder the burden of proof and show that their rival, conspiratorial, hypothesis is better than the (so-called) Official Theories, and most Conspiracy Theorists fail to do so.
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3410:
There does seem to be some indication that the US Air Force deliberately manipulated some UFO propaganda to create an air of plausible deniability for sightings of (then) classified aircraft. And yes, some political Conspiracy Theorists sometimes muse that wacky Conspiracy Theories are deliberate noise, designed as disinformation which hides the real, more plausible Conspiracies in our midsts.