We often turn to comforting stories to distract ourselves from emotionally painful truths. This paper explores a dark side of this tendency. I argue that the way false conspiracy theories are disseminated often involves packaging them as part of narratives that offer comforting alternatives to ugly truths. Furthermore, I argue that the way these narratives arouse and resolve our emotions can be part of what causes people to believe conspiracy theories. This account helps to bring out some general implications about (...) the power of narratives for misleading people into believing misinformation: I argue that narratives can cause intuitive judgements of truth that are especially difficult to dispel through critical reflection. I also sketch some practical implications for how the media can better frame their reports about both conspiracy theories and factual narratives. (shrink)

Philosophers who study conspiracy theories have increasingly addressed the questions of where conspiracy theories come from, what such theories do, and what to do about them. This essay serves as a commentary on the answers to these questions offered by contributors to this special issue.

Partisan epistemology – individuals granting greater credibility to co-partisan sources in evaluating information – is often taken to be evidence of directionally motivated reasoning in which concerns about group membership override concerns about accuracy. Against this dominant view, I outline a novel accuracy-based account of this mode of reasoning. According to this account, partisan epistemology stems from the inference that co-partisans are more likely to be right as they have superior epistemic access to the relevant facts and seek to realize (...) the correct values. I argue that this theory fits better with relevant findings than motivated-reasoning theories of partisan epistemology. Finally, I suggest it has adequate explanatory power vis-à-vis patterns of misinformation belief. (shrink)

This paper seeks to carve out a distinctive category of conspiracy theorist, and to explore the process of becoming a conspiracy theorist of this sort. Those on whom I focus claim their beliefs trace back to simply trusting their senses and experiences in a commonsensical way, citing what they take to be authoritative firsthand evidence or observations. Certain flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, and UFO conspiracy theorists, for example, describe their beliefs and evidence this way. I first distinguish these conspiracy theorists by (...) contrasting them with another group that has recently received a lot of attention from the media, philosophers, and academics more broadly. I then dig more deeply into the nature of these conspiracy theorists’ epistemic self-understanding, in order to give an account of the process by which one becomes such a conspiracy theorist. I conclude with some takeaways and implications: first, I explore the implications of my account for whether these conspiracy theorists’ beliefs are rational; then, I argue that my account has practical takeaways about counteracting beliefs in misinformation, since strategies appropriate to this kind of conspiracy theorist may not be the same ones that are appropriate for other kinds. (shrink)