Why dismiss conspiracies? (Philosophical justifications?)

This question has relevance to various issues in trying to discern how the world works and in trying to analyse the power structures which influence daily life and world events and the webs of deceit they spin to protect their interests from public scrutiny.

Clearly there are cover-ups and the rich and powerful do make decisions behind closed doors. But some people seem to take this idea to unfeasible extremes. I always tend to switch off when I hear some nutter banging on about the “bilderberg organisation”, let alone when I hear mention of “the illumunati”. But why is this? And at what point exactly do conspiracy theories become “unrealistic”?

Not all conspiracies are classed as madness. Some are even taken for granted. Like the one about a terrorist hiding in a cave with a secret organisation sending two aeroplanes to crash into a couple of sky-scrapers.

Why then are some to be believed and others ignored?

Most of what I want to look at here isn’t necessarily the inner workings of politics. I think what I want to look at primarily is the actual structure of logical thought processes and how these are supposed to correspond to reality. Or something like that.

There’s some kind of principle called Occam’s Razor or something like that, which philosophers have identified, which is supposedly a principle we implicitly invoke all the time in our every day cognitive processes, and which is also a principle of science and that is that when presented with a set of facts and various theories to try to explain that data, we should always pick the most simple theory. Then if at a later date that theory is proved wrong, only then should we look to more complex explanations.

I want to do two things here. First, I want to relate “unrealistic ideas” to this principle. Pick some examples of “crazy, far-out, wacky” possibilities and see how that principle applies to them. Secondly, I want to look at the principle itself and try to fathom where it comes from and even if it might not be correct.

Then, maybe, as an exercise, I could consider the sorts of conspiracies we here from those we dismiss as nutters, and pick a few examples and see what I can find to say about them.

Also, what is it about paranoid schizophrenics and others suffering from dysfunctional minds which makes them predisposed to think find the more far out explanations for things more believable than the rest of us?

I once met someone who believed in all manner of conspiracies including the Illuminati and all the rest of it, but he also had conspiracy theories for things going on in his personal life. Some of these things were related. He had lost a friend in a car accident, and he believed that it was not an accident but a CIA-orchestrated killing, in order to prevent world revolution which was to be led by the friend. First of all, what makes people’s minds go like that, but also, not only why is the Illuminati unbelievable but what actually makes it unlikely that this person’s friend was actually such a dangerous revolutionary that they needed to be assassinated by the CIA? I don’t believe that story for a second but I’m interested in what are the philosophical principles behind the common sense notion that such stories are to be regarded as madness.

Partly this interests me because I like to dig deep, philosophically, in the hope that one day I might just figure out how deep exactly the rabbit hole does go. But also, the practical use is that if we gain a deeper understanding of how we should discern the difference between the plausible and the implausible then we might make fewer errors in telling the difference between when accusations are indeed “mad conspiracy theories” and when the authorities and the powers that be really are pulling a fast one over us. For to suggest that this never occurs and that the world is exactly how the media portrays it is at best deeply naive. For a start the media in different countries and in different parts of the media tell pretty different stories so that can’t all be true. I’m waffling now but let’s call this the intro and click below to get into the details of what I ended up finding to say about all this stuff.

Why dismiss conspiracies then…

Why indeed?