The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) was just signed in Auckland today, despite well-organised protests, and reasonable disagreements (excepting, naturally, the hyperbole of one Matthew Hooton, who – to ape his style of discourse – is an ‘insane and embittered right-wing PR hack’) between various bodies in Aotearoa. The fact that it has been signed doesn’t in itself change our world; now the treaty has to be ratified via legislation, and it is quite possible that even at this late stage everything could collapse because – despite the assurances of US negotiators – the Congress of the United States of America may decide to either change the terms of the deal, or just not ratify it on their end.

Will that happen? Well, indications are that Congress wants ‘clarification’ on some key points (read: they want to change some of the details and requirements their negotiators committed them to), and given that President Obama has signalled that the TPPA’s signing is something he is keen on, its even possible that Republican-controlled Congress might decide not to ratify the treaty through legislation just out of sheer spite. ((The power of spite in US politics is strong at the moment; I suspect it will be granted the status of a person any day now, and will promptly sue all and sundry.)) Some have speculated that as the US never really have played fair when it comes to trade agreements – the Land of the Free likes other nations to drop tariffs; it just doesn’t think that should be a two-way street – expecting the US to sign away even the most minor concessions is laughable.

The chief complaint about the TPPA has been the secrecy under which it was negotiated, after all. Only the negotiators knew what their respective governments were willing to trade away or compromise on for potential benefits. This was not a trade deal in which the public were asked ‘What do you think?’ Rather, it was handed to them, under the idea ‘This is the best we could do!’ Most of the conspiracy theories surrounding the TPPA either have it governments like ours (Aotearoa) were always seeking to serve US interests, or the negotiators were so captured by the idea of needing to not lose face and admit the deal is bad that they have lied about the pros out weighing the cons. I’m not going to speak directly to either of those possibilities here.

No; indulge me, if you will, in a bit of ideation about another potential conspiracy. We all know (or, at least, we pretend to know) that if the TPPA was ever worth undertaking, the day the US was invited to the table was the day it got bent out of shape. The US is an economic juggernaut, whilst the original parties to the TPPA (Aotearoa, Brunei, Singapore, and Chile) were small trading partners with a few shared economic interests. The US’ demands required significant concessions of these small parties just to get them in the room. What if, then, the US never intended to give anything up at all? What if joining in the negotiations – and requiring the other players do things they didn’t want to, like extending copyright terms and the like – was merely a useful way to encourage foreign nations to adopt US-style laws without having to advocate for them through open processes?

Think of it this way: ((This is a stylistic quirk I’m considering ridding myself of, given that I feel I use it a lot in my writing.)) Given that the TPPA covers 12 countries, one country – even a big one like the US – pulling out wouldn’t necessitate the agreement collapsing. The other countries could still ratify in the hope the US would eventually join, or because they think the benefits of the treaty can still be realised without engagement from the US. Or – and I’m fond of this bit of folk psychology – the negotiators and their respective governments, because they have spent so much time and effort convincing people – including themselves – that the TPPA is good, end up ratifying just to prove their detractors wrong.

Let’s assume the US proponents of ‘American laws overseas’ know this. They want US-style laws around copyright and the like, but have found that foreign governments have been loathe to adopt them, for a variety of reasons, including fear of public opprobrium. Having failed to win the war of ideas in the democratic space, US legal patriots decide that the best way to foster US-style laws overseas is by getting governments to agree to them for some greater good… Such as improved trade access to the US market. Rather than deal with hesitant governments, they decide to push for US-style laws and regulations with the negotiators of trade deals, knowing that if they can make the turn towards Americana a straight trade-off, governments will come around to their way of thinking.

So, the US – in this story – could have entered negotiations and pushed other nations to adopt US-centric proposals, knowing that they wouldn’t have to ratify the agreement. After all, once the treaty is signed, the other nations are likely to ratify even without the US. Not doing so would be tantamount to admitting that all that effort not only had been squandered, but that the US-style changes in law aren’t actually good in-and-of-themselves. As such, ((Another stylistic quirk.)) the US gets its way without having to commit to anything.

Is this conspiracy plausible? Maybe not; the theory requires that Congress would falsely oppose the TPPA, or that President Obama would exercise his powers to fast-track the TPPA knowing that it would not pass. However, I do think that, given so many of us have shaken our heads about the whole TPPA process, its plausible enough to think ‘That’s how it could have gone down.’ No one (read: not many) outside the government seems to think the TPPA brings much to the tale, but many of the nay-sayers say we still have to sup there, because missing out would be disastrous. That is to say ((A third quirk.)) – in the words of Douglas Adams – it’s a by-pass; you’ve got to build by-passes. The worry is that the US doesn’t have to do much of anything to get us to copy them; they just have to look like they might give us some concessions.

Last week, PLOS ONE published a piece by a physicist, David Robert Grimes, which deals with the likelihood of conspiracies being kept secret over time.

Said article has been talked about a fair bit on the news over the last few days, and I've been asked by a great deal of people either to comment on it, or to outright debunk it. Given that I don't like commenting on something I haven't read, I held off saying much about it until such time I found time to not just read it, but also carefully pick through it. That time has past; I have read the piece and I am ready to give my opinion on it. This is the short version of my critique; the original version ballooned out to almost 4000 words, and I probably should turn that into an academic article of some sort. If you want the tl;dr version of my opinion, then skip to the end. Otherwise, let me edutain you.

Grimes' argument

Grimes' argument centres around the viability of conspiratorial activity, and how that weighs upon considerations of the rationality of belief in associated conspiracy theories. The structure of Grimes' argument is to:

1. Establish a baseline for the viability of known conspiracies, and then
2. Use that to assess a set of putative conspiracy theories.

There are problems with both of these parts of Grimes' argument, so let us go through them one by one. Namely:

1. The examples he uses to generate his model don't fit his model,
2. The model is insensitive to the vagaries of conspiratorial activity, and
3. He has a weird definition of what counts as a leak.

This short article only focuses on the first part of Grimes' article, establishing the baseline of his model. I have thoughts on the second part of his analyis, but by showing up problems for the viability of the model, I can show that no matter what we think of those purported conspiracies here-and-now, the Grimes' model is not up the task of analysing them.

Known conspiracies

Grimes admits conspiracies occur. It is interesting, then, to see what his chosen examples of conspiratorial activity are. They turn out to be:

1. The NSA's Mass Surveillance programme,
2. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and
3. The FBI forensic scandal.

Three examples really isn't very many, but Grimes uses them to estimate the parameters of his model about the viability of conspiracies over time.

1. Conspirators are generally dedicated to keeping their activity secret or concealed.
2. Leaks from a conspirator expose conspiracies and render them redundant.

However, his chosen examples do not fit these two assumptions, which is why he can't use them to generate a baseline for the viability of conspiratorial activity.

Take the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. If this cover-up of the unethical treatment of African-American men was exposed by conspirators, then Grimes is stretching the idea of a leak too far. Information about the experiment was published in medical journals; the cover-up, so to speak, was that the patients were not told about the experiment. The leaks – the various academic publications about the experimental results – did not end the experiments. Peter Buxton, who is often labeled as the whistleblower in this case, came to know about the experiments because of his job with the United States Public Health Service. He leaked the information to the press because his worries were not taken seriously by management. He was not a conspirator but, rather, a worried public official who learnt about the experiments without being involved in running them.

Then there is the case of Dr. Frederic Whitehurst and the FBI forensic scandal. This, like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, is a case where someone who was not a conspirator blew the lid on suspicious practices; Whitehurst was someone who, whilst checking and rechecking work, discovered that FBI management was not willing to discuss issues with that work openly. ((It's not even clear that this is a case of a conspiracy; what might be taken to be a cover-up could have just been the FBI just not listening to expert advice.))

What this says is that it's not clear two of the three examples of known conspiratorial activity fit Grimes' fit his model, which is a problem for his generation of the estimates that drive his predictions about putative claims of conspiracy.

Who are the conspirators?

A bigger problem still is that Grimes does not distinguish between conspirators and whistleblowers.

Take the NSA mass surveillance conspiracy theory, for example. Grimes would have us believe that Snowden was a conspirator who leaked information about what it was the NSA were up to, and this lead to the exposure of PRISM and related surveillance programmes. That certainly is one version of that story, but it's important to note that Snowden's narrative is that of being a whistleblower: Snowden – at least in his recounting – learnt what the NSA were up to, played the role of a good contractor, and was eventually granted access to the files he needed to show the world what it was the NSA were really doing. Snowden, on this version of the story is not so much a conspirator, but a whistleblower who went undercover at the NSA. As such, the Snowden revelations do not fit with the assumptions that drives Grimes' model.

Grimes does not distinguish between kinds of conspirators, let alone conspirators and whistleblowers. Conspirators are not homogenous; a conspiracy can look big, yet only feature a small number of people who know the full extent or aim of the conspiracy. Some members of the conspiracy will be lackeys, goons or even unwitting conspirators. It's possible to be involved in a conspiracy without realising you are conspiring. Not everyone in the NSA need necessarily know that the data they are collecting and processing has been illegally obtained, and FBI agents who are using forensic evidence to secure convictions may not have been informed by senior personnel that the evidence they are using is of dubious merit.

What is a leak, anyway?

Grimes asserts in his paper that a leak from a conspirator will expose a conspiracy and render it redundant. But 'leak' is an ambiguous term; some leaks are accidental, some are purposeful, and some 'leaks' don't even come from conspirators at all.

Take, for example, accidental leaks. These are cases a conspirator fails to cover up some facet of their conspiratorial activity. So, for example, in the Watergate Affair, it was surely a mistake or accident that Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the White House tapes. This was an accidental leak, one which – in part – helped expose the cover-up of who knew about the break-in of the Democrat National Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Contrast this with a purposeful leak, where, say, a disgruntled member of the conspiracy leaks information about the conspiracy in order to expose it. Such leaks are, for example, common when it comes to leadership coups, and a variety of political conspiracies, where there is an advantage to some former conspirator to out what has been happening, in order to either change sides or escape blame. ((Indeed, sometimes these leaks presage the fact that the conspiracy is on the verge of collapse, and the leak is a pre-emptive strike by certain conspirators to save face.))

Whatever the case, Grimes is committed to the idea that conspirators leak, and that such leaks expose and make redundant the conspiracy. But it is not clear that conspirators leaking is the only way in which conspiracies get exposed. Admittedly, Grimes is not expressly committed to the idea only conspirators leak. But, given that his model seems insufficiently sensitive to how leaking works, let alone the difference between leaks from conspirators and external whistleblowers, this is a problem.

Indeed, none of the examples Grimes uses, as outlined above, fit with the known conspiracies he uses to derive his model, let alone give him any justification to then show that a number of purported conspiracy theories are irrational to believe. As such, Grimes does not do enough to warrant his own theory, let alone allow him to then extend that analysis to purported conspiracies now.

tl;dr: Grimes’s article doesn’t just misrepresent the nature of conspiratorial activity, let alone how they are exposed, his article seems to mostly exist to justify our suspicion of ‘crazy’ conspiracy theories.

Do you know what is irritating? Arguments on the internet. Despite my obviously cankerous nature, I don’t really enjoy arguing online; it makes my heart race, et cetera, etc, amen. Still, sometimes it seems necessary, especially in cases where people write on a subject you know well, or just happen to be an expert in. Case in point: Sam Kriss’s piece on conspiracy theories, Notes towards a phenomenology of conspiracy theory. This is obviously a topic dear to my heart, and, given I am a regularly reader of Sam’s work, I was disappointed by his musings on the subject. So much so that I read it several times, over the space of a number of day days, each time finding another reason as to why I didn’t like it. As such, I wrote a(n admittedly lengthy) comment over at Sam’s blog, setting out why I found his proposed phenomenology so problematic.

Said comment has been in moderation for nearly two months now.

Rather than let my comment go to waste, I’ve decided to post a revised version of it here. It’s not particularly self-explanatory; you will need to read Sam’s piece to see where I am coming from. With that said, I think it’s important to have this response out there; there are a lot of very weird views on conspiracy theories making the rounds, and this happen’s to be a reply to one of them.

Hi, Sam. Long time reader; first time commentator. And like many first time commentators, I’m here to complain!

Let me start out by saying a little about who I am; I am a philosopher, like Charles Pigden, who writes on conspiracy theories. I wrote a book, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories (which, co-incidentally, Charles wrote the introduction to), and I have a number of articles coming out on the subject. I’m a social epistemologist by training, so I found it interesting that the basis for your short essay on conspiracy theories was both an attack on epistemology generally, and a criticism of the work of Charles Pigden specifically. Neither attack seems warranted to my mind, and I’d like to explain why.

Let’s start with Pigden and his work, of whom you say:

Pidgen’s central proposition – that we should believe conspiracy theories, or at the very least investigate them while being open to the possibility that we might – is not dissimilar to mine, but the case he makes is an epistemic one, and given that there’s clearly something broken in epistemic reasoning, it’s inevitably insufficient.

Now, obviously, your comments on Charles’ work are due to your views on epistemology. Still, let me state outright that if you really think he – as you go on to say – “spent the bulk of his essay disproving a position that nobody actually holds”, then you clearly haven’t read much of the academic literature Charles is responding to. The position Charles defends (which is also defended by other philosophers: David Coady, Brian L. Keeley, Lee Basham, and myself, to name but a few) is one opposed by the likes of Karl Popper, Richard Hofstadter, Cass Sunstein, Adrian Vermuele, Quassim Cassam, Jovan Byford, Karen Douglas, David Aaronvitch, Michael Barkun, Rob Brotherton, Chris French, Geoffrey Cubitt, Ted Goertzel, Neil Levy, Pete Mandik… Well, I could go, but I am sure you can see my point; to claim (as you do) that Pigden is tilting at windmills might rhetorically suit your argument, but it’s just not true. You, like Charles, might think the academic position he is arguing against is silly or mistaken, but it’s still a position a great many (I would even say the majority of) scholars and politicians hold as being self-evident.

That’s my first point. My second is that I think your criticism of Charles is confused, and that’s because you characterise modern epistemology in a way that I, as an epistemologist, don’t really recognise.

For example, you say that the ‘unspoken axiom behind all epistemology’ is about believing propositional truths.’ That hasn’t really been true since at least the 1960s, when Gettier challenged the ‘justified true belief’ account of knowledge in his paper ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ ((The JTB account was challenged earlier – see Russell’s Clocktower example – but Gettier’s piece was the one that set the epistemological scene for the second half of the 20th Century.)) Most of the epistemological work post Gettier has been focused on the whether we ought to believe propositions on the basis of various epistemic justifications, with the idea that we should simply believe propositions merely because they are true being very much a secondary consideration for most of us. ((The position you describe appears to be the naive empiricism of the early 20th Century. That was more a position in Metaphysics than it was one in Epistemology.)) After all, it’s hard to know some proposition is actually true, whilst it’s much easier – and interesting – to ask ‘What justifies belief in said proposition?’ ((Indeed, quite a number of epistemologists are worried about the idea of propositional truth even being necessary for knowledge, because of the worry that truth and justification aren’t necessarily linked.)) As such, your claim about the unspoken axion in epistemology is neither axiomatic (epistemologists debate this, so it can’t be an axiom), nor unspoken (epistemologists debate this publicly, so it’s definitely not unspoken).

I think your old-fashioned and inaccurate view on epistemology informs your subsequent criticism of Charles’ view in some interesting ways. For example, it’s not clear why you would think that the charge that Iraq had WMDs being a lie happens to make it not a conspiracy theory (something you hold against Charles’ view). After all, these things are surely complementary. One of the ways people successfully conspire is via lying. Think of it this way: Let’s say I don’t want it to get out that my friends and I are all shape-shifting lizards, whose entire academic purpose is to hide the existence of the New World Order. As such, we smear our opponents as charlatans, whose views are the result of them being high on the old ‘reefer madness’. It’s a lie, but since people believe it, it helps cover up what we’re doing. It seems pretty clear we’re conspiring here, and we just happen to be using a lie to do so.

For another, it also isn’t clear that your proposed example of a conspiracy theory which doesn’t fit Pigden’s definition doesn’t actually fit Charles’ definition. You proffer as an example of such a conspiracy theory this:

Had George W Bush instead announced that President Hussein were the high priest of an ancient Mesopotamian death-cult that had controlled humanity since the dawn of civilisation through the emasculating medium of writing, and that he could only be defeated by a sturdy gang of tooled-up all-American illiterates, some people might still have believed him, but that would have been unambiguously a conspiracy theory.

Yet in a world where Bush had said such a thing, this would be as much a lie as the WMD story. Yet you say this lie is ‘unambiguously a conspiracy theory’, whilst the actual lie about WMDs, which was told in this world, is not. I’m honestly not sure why you think your ‘unambigious’ example of a conspiracy theory in anyway contradicts Charles’ definition, let alone how it is different from the example you chastise him for using.

And not just that; it’s not even clear Pigden holds to the idea you attribute to him – that a conspiracy theory is a proposition that can be taxonomically isolated by its propositional content – because Pigden (like most philosophers who write on the topic) classifies these things we call ‘conspiracy theories’ as a species of explanation. That means a conspiracy theory consists of a set of propositions arranged as an explanatory argument. The position you take against Pigden – that a conspiracy theory is a relation between propositions – turns out to be Pigden’s position in the first instance.

I think the inconsistency of your proposed view and what you take it Charles is arguing for or against comes out of your skewed view of epistemology generally. You take it that as conspiracy theories can be expressed as single propositions, epistemologists judge them as singular propositions. Yet that’s not what we do at all. We take it that they are explanatory hypotheses, made up of multiple explanans. We then argue just how we are meant to appraise both the individual explanans, and the explanatory argument itself. That’s why we can, in some cases, condemn particular conspiracy theories, whilst also admitting that some of the evidence used by proponents of said theories is worth considering seriously.

Which brings me to my greatest worry with your piece; despite your professed views, I think you end up being the kind of conspiracy theory theorist that Charles is arguing against (i.e. you turn out to be one of his ‘windmills’). After all, you claim that:

Conspiracy theory is not a theory that posits a conspiracy, but the hypostasisation of conspiracy to the level of theory, or occlusion as a general system of Being. It’s not just that public events have hidden causes: the seen is only an attribute or epiphenomenon of the unseen, which is essential to reality. In many conspiracy theories, the primary aim of the conspiracy seems to be the presentation of an experience in which the conspiracy itself does not outwardly appear.

That seems awfully like the kind of theories about conspiracy theories Charles is ’tilting’ against. You seem to be characterising conspiracy theories in generalist terms, trying to find a way to provide for a general analysis of all conspiracy theories. Charles, however, takes a particularist approach, one where we judge individual conspiracy theories on their respective merits. Maybe that’s the rub? ((Note how you find yourself having to say ‘many conspiracy theories’; already the generalist project you are engaging in begins to falter.))

Still, you will be happy to know that you are not along in your views; your final thoughts on what these things called ‘conspiracy theories’ are reminded me of Mark Fenster’s book on the topic (“Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture”). Whilst I don’t think theorising about conspiracy theories in the way you do is particularly helpful, it is certainly a popular one. Hopefully you’ll take these comments in the way I intend them; not as a vicious attack on your views, but as an opening for a better discussion on conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorising.

Cher,

Matthew

P.S. Then there are your various legalistic and historical arguments. With regard to the law, just because something is a legal concept, that does not make it neither epistemological nor phenomenological. Talk of conspiracy theories goes back at least a hundred years, so the fact it might not have been legally codified until recently tells us very little about the concept itself. That, handily, brings us to history. You might want to look at the works of historians who have written on conspiracy theories and conspiracy narratives (Victoria Emma Pagán’s ‘Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History’, Gordon S. Wood’s ‘Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century’, and Geoffrey Cubitt’s ‘The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth Century France’ come to mind) for a broader discussion of conspiracy theories pre 1977 (although if you want something modern, try Kathryn S. Olmsted’s ‘Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11’)

Just a note to philosophers and social scientists that they have until November of this year to work on a paper which could appear beside one of mine in a special issue of Argumenta on the ethics and epistemology of conspiracy theories. See here.