Crippled Epistemologies

I’d like to look more carefully at the paper by Sunstein and Vermule that I mentioned last time. Their argument is interesting, but I suspect that the picture they paint is mistaken in some important ways.

Sunstein and Vermule are interested in understanding why conspiracy theorists have the views that they do, and what the response of governments should be. It should be noted that their interest is primarily in “conspiracy theories relating to terrorism, especially theories that arise from and post-date the 9/11 attacks”(p.3). They are trying to formulate policy proposals, and so are mostly worried about politically relevant theories. I’m not that concerned about being relevant. But their work is still interesting to me, and relevant to woo nonetheless.

Their narrative goes in two steps – first, they diagnose the causes of conspiracy theorizing. Briefly, they believe that people buy into conspiracy theories because they are working with crippled epistemologies, by which they mean “sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources”(p.3) So conspiracy theorists have crippled epistemologies because they aren’t getting enough good information from diverse enough sources.

Having identified crippled epistemologies as the basic problem, they recommend cognitive infiltration as the appropriate response. That is, governments should infiltrate conspiracy theory groups, and try to let a little air in, dispelling false beliefs and so breaking up their narratives.

Maybe this strategy makes sense for 9/11 truthers, and maybe it doesn’t. I tend to think it would be ineffective: it is already common for 9/11 truthers to engage (with varying levels of seriousness) the arguments of 9/11 debunkers. (eg. here). A government sponsored entry into the fray would only feed the discussion.

But regardless of the status of this strategy in the cases Sunstein and Vermule focus on, I’m quite confident it would do nothing to disrupt the woo-woo community. The basic problem, I tend to think, is with their model of theorists as driven by crippled epistemologies. I’m not saying that woo-woos have their epistemological ducks all in a row; far from it. But the suggestion that these alternative worldviews are the result of a lack of information is to get things all wrong.

I agree that woo is kept insulated from debunking by mistrust from authoritative sources of knowledge. This is precisely the function of the Principle of Inverse Authority. But that they distrust mainstream sources doesn’t entail that they are closed minded, or are only looking at a few source of information. The incredible narrative diversity in the woo-woo world should be enough to demonstrate that much.

They are not, emphatically not, simply reading books and beliving what they read. The compelling power of these narratives doesn’t derive from a few half-baked arguments, but from the living experiential connection woo-woos have with their world. They have resolved to trust their own experience above anything else, their own moral and semiotic compasses.

To see how this gnostic streak in woo functions, consider the role of “witnesses”, as the good people at Project Camelot are wont to call them. Information is constantly being fed into the woo-woo world from people claiming to have contact with (aliens|CIA black ops|NASA insiders|trans-dimensional beings|the Illuminati). Quite often, the contact is explicitly described as being (psychic|telepathic|remote viewed), what we would call their inner experience. Not all of these experiences are accepted by the entirety of the woo community of course – if someone’s report contradicts someone else’s narrative, it will be written off as either disinformation or an erroneous interpretation. But when someone’s report of an experience they have had confirms, augments or even advances the narrative of someone else’s woo, it will be incorporated as fresh data.

So further than just being open to arguments (which we can see even at the mundane level of the 9/11 truth movement), proper woo-woos are open to a whole different dimension of new information. They are actively engaging with their unconscious minds and opening up new narratives all the time according to what they find there. This makes their narratives adaptive and flexible. If there is a sense in which their epistemology is crippled, it is surely not because of a lack of information.