Conspiracy Theories and the Problem of Disappearing Knowledge | Quassim Cassam | TEDxWarwick

[Music] supposing that I live in a high crime area and that when I left home this morning I switched on the burglar alarm as I always do and it really matters whether it's Richard or not how do I know that I switched it on well I remember switching it on my recollection that I switched on the burglar alarm gives me confidence that I switched it on and this confidence is based on a kind of trust which I'm going to call self trust I trust myself to know to be able to be capable of knowing whether I switched on the alarm or not it is not just that I am confident that I switch it on I have the right to be confident I have the right to be confident as long as my memory is in fact reliable it's not just that I do trust myself I have the right to trust myself again as long as I'm generally reliable about this kind of thing okay now supposing that you were with me this morning for some reason and you say to me now look you didn't switch it on you're telling me that you did but I saw you I saw you would leave the house and I saw that you didn't switch it on okay and then you might remind me of all the previous occasions when I forgot to do something which I thought I'd done okay so you go on at me now if you're convincing enough what you might achieve is the implanting of doubts in my mind about whether I switched on the alarm or not I started off pretty confident that I did but now I'm not so sure I started off trusting myself now I don't and the effect of this loss of confidence this loss of self trust the effect I want to suggest is loss of knowledge I've gone from knowing something that I've switched on the alarm to not knowing it and I've gone from knowing to not knowing as a result of these doubts which you've implanted in my mind the more I doubt the less I know the less confident I am in myself and in my beliefs the less I know knowledge requires a certain degree of confidence knowledge requires a certain degree of trust not just trust in other people but trust in yourself trust in you the knower now if that's right then there's a very effective way of depriving someone else of their knowledge if you want to deprive someone else of their knowledge a really effective way of doing that is to erode their confidence and to erode their trust in themselves and in the burglar alarm example I want to just make a couple of observations that I think are quite important the first observation is that I can lose my knowledge in this example regardless of whether I did or didn't switch on the alarm even if I did switch on the alarm even if I'm right and you're wrong I could still end up not knowing whether I switched on the alarm or not it's not that i no longer know because the facts have changed the facts haven't changed I did switch on the alarm okay so it it the loss of knowledge is the result of a change in me in my psychology rather than a change in the world that the second thing I want to say about this example which i think is also quite important is that it actually doesn't matter whether you really believe that I switched on the alarm or not I mean maybe you're just messing with me I mean maybe you're just making it your mission to undermine my confidence and people do that sometimes right I mean maybe you just you're just messing with my head okay so at the point at which I finally say well I don't know maybe I didn't switch on the alarm you've kind of what right and you you you've won you've succeeded in implanting these doubts self-doubt in me regardless of whether you believe that I have any reason to doubt myself okay so what I've just described is how you can go from knowing to not knowing even though there's been no change in the facts that's what I've just described okay and that's what I called the problem of disappearing knowledge a person's knowledge can be made to disappear to vanish by undermining their self-confidence and their self trust okay what's that got to do with fate news and conspiracy theories so what I want to suggest to you is that one of the actual and indeed intended effects of the proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories is to undermine to erode our confidence in our ability to know what the world around us is like and how it works and by eroding our confidence in our ability to know they actually erode our ability to know ok so just just to remind you knowing requires a degree of confidence it requires a degree of self Trust by undermining that you actually undermine knowledge and you can do that with that without without any change in the facts so let me give you let me give you an example so supposing that I believe the official account as people like to call it the official account of what happened on 9/11 now if I expose if I'm if I'm exposed to lots and lots of conspiracy theories about 9/11 the result of that exposure may well be to make me doubt what actually happened I might end up thinking well I don't know I mean maybe it was a conspiracy okay now that effect that that transformation of my attitude towards 9/11 was brought about by my exposure to the tip to upper due to particular theory exposure to conspiracy theories and I want to suggest that that is fundamentally the point of these theories I mean of course sometimes people put forward conspiracy theories because they want to discredit somebody or for some other or some other reason but one of the one of the effects of these theories is to is to instill to implant doubts in our minds and to make us no longer confident in our own beliefs about the way the world works now of course from the perspective of the conspiracy theorist that's exactly the aim I mean the thought that that someone who wants to propose one of his theories may have is that well you have no right to believe the official account because the official account is in fact false but the point I want to make is it actually regardless of whether the official account is true or not regardless of that I can still go from my initial state of believing something to not believing it as a result of exposure to conspiracy theories now of course the 9/11 example is very very controversial and and I don't want it to take a stand on that for today's purposes so let me now give you another example which I hope is much less controversial so one of them one of the the most pernicious conspiracy theories around today is the theory that the Holocaust is a myth many of you will have come across this this theory now of course one thing that it is very striking is is how Holocaust denial in the Internet age has become more and more prevalent there's more and more evidence of people subscribing to some version of Holocaust denial now in the psychological literature there's lots of discussion of why people believe conspiracy theories in the first place and what are the social consequences of belief in conspiracy theories I'm not really interested for the moment in why people believe them or in the social consequences I'm just interested in the consequences for people's knowledge so essentially if you start off believing the received account of the Holocaust but you then have prolonged exposure to lots of Holocaust denying websites you could end up and indeed lots of people do end up in the position of wondering well I don't know what really happened ok so that's another that's another example of of how you can go from knowing to not knowing as a result of having doubts implanted in your mind by these sorts of theories okay so this raises a kind of practical question what's the appropriate response then if we want to protect our knowledge we want to protect our knowledge for example of the reality of the Holocaust what do we need to do now there on the face of it there are kind of two responses there are two responses that you could have one response is ignore and the other response is rebut okay so the ignore response says something like this the no responses look I mean if the result of exposure to these theories is to make you doubt yourself or to doubt what you have all read always taken to be the case then maybe the right response is just to ignore them to avoid them don't engage with them no good will come of it so that's the that's the that's the ignores the response but that response doesn't seem to me to be satisfactory it's not satisfactory for a whole variety of different reasons so one reason is this ignoring these theories for a start seems like a case of intellectual cowardice I mean the obvious thing to think is look if you're if you're so convinced that something happened and somebody else says to you no it didn't then you need to be able to defend yourself you need to be able to give reasons in support of the claim that it did happen it's not enough to just bury your head in the sand and say I'm not listening to you however obnoxious or repulsive the views are that are being put to you I think there's also a moral obligation to stand up for the truth there's a moral obligation to stand up for the facts it's not a game I mean it actually matters what happened in the Second World War it actually matters what happened on 9/11 and so on so again it's important it's essential to actually show what the facts are to concentrate on the facts and I think it's important also not to be suckered into thinking that well it's all a matter of opinion it isn't all a matter of opinion it's a matter of what actually happened so suppose you agree then that the appropriate response in these cases is actually to engage with the theories that have been put to you and to show that you're right and they're wrong if they are wrong right so in the in the case of Holocaust denial you might think and indeed I do think that the appropriate response is not to say I'm going to ignore them but the appropriate response is to actually rebut them by looking at the facts and the evidence and of course now we run into a real practical problem and the practical problem is that most of us lack the expertise to really be able to say what the evidence shows I mean I with regard to 911 I'm not a structural engineer I'm not a physicist I'm not in a position really to determine what happened that day in the case of the Holocaust I'm not a historian I mean I don't have the the historical knowledge or the skills to defend the official account on the basis of documentary evidence so there's a kind of problem now the problem is that on the one hand it's very easy to lose knowledge by having these theories put to you and not being able to respond to them and that problem is it is it is made worse by the fact that actually most of us don't have the expertise that's required to respond and of course that's it in in many ways what these what these theories exploit so you you may you may think you know what's going on but somebody says to you yes but what about this what about that what's your answer to this question what's your answer to that question and it's very easy to get to the point of saying well I don't know hey leave me alone I don't know well I think that's it's it's true that most of us don't have the expertise and don't have the time to really tackle these theories head-on but fortunately there are people who do have the expertise and who do have the time and these people are called experts it's it whoops sometimes tol that that well we don't need experts all that well you know there's no such thing as an expert it's just your opinion or it's just my opinion and I think that's that's exactly what needs to be resisted I think whether someone is an expert or not for example an expert on German history or an expert on aeronautical engineering or that is not a matter of opinion whether someone is competent and qualified to pronounce on these subjects is I think to some extent an objective matter it's a matter of their qualifications their experience their knowledge and so on their track record these are all the these are all the relevant factors so I think that when faced with this loss of the threat of the loss of knowledge the only way to really protect our knowledge the only way to actually say look there is a difference between truth and falsity there is the possibility of deciding what happened is to draw on the work of people who are competent to judge and I think it's worth it's worth also asking those who are propounding these various conspiracy theories which is what worth asking them well what's your competence to judge it's all very well you saying you don't know what you're talking about or you're not you're not qualified to judge are they qualified to judge some of them might be but certainly not all okay so it says so that's that that's the pit that's a story I want to tell it seems to me that all of us now are living in a world in which there is a tremendous amount of stuff out there online particularly there's a conspiracy theory for absolutely everything and I'm certainly not saying that all conspiracy theories are false and I don't really want to get into a discussion of the truth or falsity of particular conspiracy theories but what I do want to suggest you is that these theories can have this effect of this bewildering us of making us think just all too complicated I just don't know what to think anymore and that and the ultimate result is the whole idea of well there's no such thing as truth hence post truth politics and I think that's what needs to be avoided but it can't be avoided just by ignoring just by ignoring this phenomenon so here's a kind of motto that I want to end with when faced with all these theories that question our beliefs about for example Holocaust the motto should not be ignore ignore ignore the motto should be ribbit ribbit ribbit thanks for listening [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 259,382

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Humanities, Debate, Decision making, Global issues, Philosophy

Id: h-eQ2bR1HFk

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2017