Abstract

Basham argues that the mutually reinforcing effects of the political pieties characteristic of Western-style democracies, and a concomitant conspiracy theory phobia, distort social science concerning the evaluation of conspiracy theorizing. A pathologizing project emerges to minimize such theorizing. The resultant pathologizing project has discernable stages based on a medical model; disease, causal diagnosis and mass-eradication. Influential social scientists lobby for the development of society-wide cures for reflecting on and seeking evidence for potentially warranted conspiracy theories. Most philosophers in social epistemology, a significant number of other social scientists and cultural theorists, and the public at large, are skeptical of any such project. Conspiracy theorizing is a thoughtful, normal and democratically necessary activity. There is scarce acknowledgement of this in mainstream social science, but a disturbing omission. Conspiracy theorizing is assumed to be a personal and social disease. Studies are designed, results interpreted, around this assumption. With other social epistemologists, Basham argues that in each of the pathologizing project’s stages, it is neither empirically well-founded nor politically wise. In fact, history teaches otherwise.