Bibliographic record
Abstract
While conspiracy theories are often considered epistemologically suspect, this work endeavors to provide a neutral assessment of these theories on epistemological grounds, and then examining the phenomenon that underlies the pejorative understanding.Beginning with a broad definition, conspiracy theories are assessed within the context of inquiry, and connections are drawn to similar types of theory present throughout history, such as a superstition and myths.Then, conspiracy theories are considered within the context of epistemic attitudes, and a distinction is drawn between conspiracy theorists, individuals who hold to at least one conspiracy theory, and conspiracists, individuals who demonstrate an attachment to conspiracy theories beyond their epistemological warrant.Conspiracism is then evaluated in the context of inquiry and the epistemic attitudes in order to identify where it errs, why individuals subscribe to it, and how it harms those individuals and those connected to them.By investigating conspiracism, this work seeks to set the stage for possible means of addressing this phenomenon.May 3, 2024 §1. IntroductionOn a dark night outside an urban center in North America, a science experiment is being conducted.There is a camera on a tripod facing a flat board with a hole cut in it a short distance away.Beyond that, another board with another hole cut in it.The camera, and each hole, is measured to be 17 feet above the water level.On one end, an individual is manning the camera and speaking through a walkie-talkie.On the other end, his partner is holding up a flashlight attached to a measuring stick.If the flashlight is held at 17 feet above water level, and the light can be seen by the camera through both holes, hundreds of years of science will be called into question.Indeed, this would indicate that the Earth has no curvature.However, if the camera cannot see the light until the flashlight is held at 23 feet above water level, then this result will match the current scientific consensus; namely, that the Earth is a globe. 1Jeran Campbell, the man at the camera, is expecting the former result.He asks his partner for the measurement on the flashlight.They reply that it is currently at 17 feet above water level.However, the camera cannot see the light.He asks that his partner raise the flashlight slowly and tells him to stop when the light can finally be seen by the camera.He asks for the current measurement, and his partner replies that the flashlight is 23 feet above water level.Jeran replies, "Interesting."This is a description of a scene from a documentary titled Behind the Curve, which follows several proponents of the 'Flat Earth Theory'. 2 This theory posits that there is a global conspiracy which aims to convince the populace that the Earth is a globe, rather than being a flat circle surrounded by an ice wall.While this theory is considered absurd by many, it is not its absurdity that I find intriguing.What I find most interesting is not the theory itself, but the adherents who believe it and their actions in the face of contrary evidence.In the case of the Flat-Earthers, these are individuals who are following the scientific method: they encounter a 1 A diagram of this experiment can be found in Appendix A. 2 (Clark, 2018)
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".