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Record W4412577912 · doi:10.1080/02691728.2025.2522414

Trusting Conspiracy Theories

2025· article· en· W4412577912 on OpenAlex
D Zund Joseph

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial Epistemology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMisinformation and Its Impacts
Canadian institutionsQueen's University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEpistemologySociologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Conspiracy theories have mainly been of interest to social epistemologists in terms of whether one can be warranted in believing them. In this literature, believing a conspiracy theory is often understood to mean endorsing some conspiratorial explanation of events. I argue that, in some cases, conspiracy belief is better understood as (dis)trusting sources of claims. To demonstrate this, I show that disputes over conspiracy theories possess a distinctive tendency (but not a necessity) to generate deep disagreement arising specifically from divergent attributions of trust in others. I explain this tendency in terms of agents’ desires to maintain consistency among their beliefs and avoid inquiring into their attributions of trust. Individuals who believe conspiracy theories often do not remain committed to the same conspiratorial explanations but do nonetheless remain firmly committed to attitudes of trust and distrust. By arguing that conspiracy belief often manifests as (dis)trust, I challenge a common assumption in the philosophy of conspiracy theories that conspiracy belief, understood as taking conspiracy explanations to be true, can always serve as an appropriate basis for asking when believing conspiracy theories is warranted.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.910
Threshold uncertainty score0.887

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.375
Teacher spread0.352 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it