By Ben Long
As cliché as the sentiment may be, the presence of social media has indeed made both information and disinformation more readily accessible to the public. This is especially the case in the political sphere, where election denialism and intolerant rhetoric can spread rapidly. In light of this, the question ‘How should we respond to misinformation?’ becomes particularly pressing due to the ability of the young and impressionable to be exposed to extreme ideas and be led down conspiratorial pipelines.
A natural response to the challenge of political misinformation and conspiracy theories is to simply debunk them. After all, with all of the facts at our fingertips, one need only read a small disclaimer below a post to be set back on the road of rational enquiry. Arguably, this is the approach that has been taken by social media companies over the past few years, with fact-checking becoming a key tool in identifying misinformation.
Whilst it is praiseworthy that steps have been taken to remedy the problem of misinformation, I contend that the ethos behind political fact-checking is mistaken. In order to do this, it is useful to distinguish between three individuals who may encounter a conspiracy theory online. Alan is a man who is already critical of conspiracy theories and who has the media literacy and critical disposition that enables him to reliably evaluate sources of information. Next is Bob, who is a fully-fledged conspiracy theorist, one who buys into the claims made by sources that are the target of fact-checkers. Finally, there is Craig, who is on the margins of believing a particular conspiracy theory but who still has nagging doubts about doing so. Whilst the underlying assumptions of political fact-checking may be useful for Alan and possibly Craig, I contend that it is much less useful for Bob.
Why may I advance such a claim? My main reason for doing so is that I believe that the propositions believed by conspiracy theorists are not in the market for straightforward debunking. Rather, they more closely resemble what Wittgenstein (1974)1 classified as hinge propositions. These propositions are ones which are held with a basic certainty of which no evidence could be given.
Consider the proposition ‘the world has existed for a long time’. Imagine trying to convince someone of the truth of this claim, you may show them fossils or reports of ancient history in order to prove that the proposition is true. However, if one were unsure of whether or not the world has existed for a long time, then for what reason would they accept your evidence. The fossils you may present to the historical sceptic are taken as evidence only because one presupposes that they existed in a world a long time ago. Without your interlocuter ‘buying in’ to the claim about the existence of the past, no evidence can be given for it. Instead of believing hinge propositions for a set of reasons supported by evidence or deductive reasoning, they are an ‘inherited background’ (OC, 94) against which we act, enquire, and generate evidence.
Let us again consider the beliefs of Bob the conspiracy theorist. Nicholas Smith has identified a particular conspiracy hinge as: ‘There is a secret collective of Satanic child traffickers in positions of cultural and political import’ (2022, p365).
Bob may hold onto this view so firmly that no amount of countering evidence or fact-checking may serve to disprove it. Smith gives us the recent example of election denialism by hardcore supporters of Donald Trump, where no amount of counterevidence would sway the conspiracy theorist- for it simply is not evidence for them in the first place. One may imagine Bob being presented with solid empirical evidence in favour of Joe Biden rightfully winning the 2020 election, only for him to respond, ‘That’s what they want you to think!’. The mistake of the fact-checking response to conspiracy theories is simply that such beliefs are insulated from revision, especially from ‘mainstream’ sources.
Going further, why would Bob take the fact checker seriously if his faith in conspiracy hinges is so certain? Part of the narrative of populism is that its leaders are representative of common sense as opposed to the progressive ideology of Western elites. The hinges held by Bob are viewed as just as intuitive as the existence of the external world, leading attempts to debunk them to resemble the Orwellian dictum of ‘2+2=5’. If this is the case, then there is little surprise if fact checkers routinely try to debunk conspiratorial content in their crusade against straight talkers like Bob.
To pre-empt an objection to the claim that some of Bob’s beliefs are hinges which are beyond the realm of rational disconfirmation, isn’t it clear that such claims have been debunked? The trustworthiness of valid journalism is not of the same kind as the certainty we have of the existence of the external world. Noncircular reasons can be given for why satanic elites don’t rule the world- so why treat the view as a hinge?2
We can consider hinges from two perspectives- universal and particular. Many hinges are taken to be universal, such as the belief that our senses are reliable or that the world exists. Others, however, are constrained to either a particular framework (Ranalli, 2022)or a particular individual. In the case of Bob, the hinge may either be part of an ideological framework or simply a certainty held by Bob as an individual. In either case, the views that Bob holds as the most basic are alien to the fact checkers- making their efforts (even if correct) irrelevant to the belief’s hinge status. Even if one is not persuaded by this distinction in terms of what may rationally qualify as a hinge- we could say that Bob takes certain propositions (irrationally) to be hinges for him or his worldview.3
A second confusion behind the fact checker response is that it views Bob’s beliefs strictly as a way for Bob to arrive at the truth. Whilst arriving at the truth may be part of the story, it is by no means the entire picture. As Cassam (2019) notes, the primary function of conspiracy theories is political rather than epistemic. The views peddled by conspiracy theorists function to mobilise and motivate a particular demographic against a cabal of shadowy elites. Even if a conspiracy theory is not overtly political, it tends to operate within a network of other (more political) theories which can send an individual down a radicalising pipeline.
In a peculiar way, Bob’s belief in conspiracy theories depends on a kind of pragmatic justification. If the belief helps to explain (or integrate) the role of a political nemesis in day-to-day affairs, then it ought to be believed. Even the (justified) outrage of one’s political opponents may be enough to warrant these beliefs, this being the central tenet of the conservative strategy of owning the libs. Once again, if Bob’s beliefs are held for the above (non-truth-tracking) reasons, then why should he take an apparently liberal fact-checker seriously?
I’d like to highlight a final feature of Bob’s conspiratorial views- the role of expression. Put simply, believing in a conspiracy theory makes you a part of something. In an age of increasing political polarisation, political beliefs can become more integrated into one’s sense of self and embody a ‘form of life’ (OC, 358). Bob’s belief in a conspiracy theory not only strikes him as commonsensical but also as a deeply held commitment that informs how he goes about his daily investigations- if that is the right word. Attempts to debunk or fact-check this framework misses the fact that it is not acquired by “satisfying [ourselves] of its correctness” (OC, 94) and are bound to be construed as an attack on those who live by them.
Is there an alternative to the fact-checking solution that I have criticised in regard to Bob? I believe so, although it is much more personal. Wittgenstein remarked that ‘[a]t the end of reasons comes persuasion’ (OC, 612); what is needed is not debunking deeply held hinges but a reshaping of the worldview which they support. In order to persuade Bob, we must work gradually to change the beliefs which lie on the periphery of his worldview. These are the beliefs which rely on hinges for their legitimacy, such as a belief that a particular policy will have certain negative effects, which nonetheless can be challenged without direct reference to the hinge commitment.
Better yet is to expose Bob to other (to repeat Wittgenstein’s term) forms of life in which the hinge has no role and is open to empirical falsification- this means getting out of the online echo chamber in the first place. After this combined process of gradual belief revision and socialisation, Bob may hopefully find himself dropping his conspiratorial hinge commitment for it no longer provides its pragmatic or epistemic function without ever tackling it head-on (Smith, 2022). The best way to guide those like Bob away from falsehood is to make such falsehoods neither logically nor pragmatically necessary for them and to do this they may need to just log off.
- Hereafter referred to as OC. ↩︎
- This is an interesting objection both for interpretative and philosophical reasons. For Wittgenstein, several (now intuitively) empirical propositions played a role as hinges, such as nobody has been to the moon (OC, 108) yet it is unclear how these propositions change their status. Some philosophers inspired by Wittgenstein contend that hinges are only those propositions for which no proof whatsoever can be given (Coliva, 2015), whereas others such as Ranalli (2022) argue that hinges can have varied scopes. ↩︎
- I am using ‘takes’ here in a very broad sense, for we have seen that hinges are not believed for independent evidential reasons. It may be better to talk of Bob as acting and believing in a way which gives certain views a hinge status for him. ↩︎
References:
Cassam, Q. (2019) Conspiracy theories. John Wiley & Sons.
Coliva, A. (2015) Extended rationality: A hinge epistemology. Springer.
Ranalli, C. (2022) Political Hinge Epistemology. In: Moyal-Sharrock, D. & Sandis, C., eds. Extending Hinge Epistemology. Anthem Press: 127-148.
Smith, N. (2022) A quasi-fideist approach to QAnon. Social Epistemology, 36 (3): 360-377.
Wittgenstein, L., Wright, G. H. v. & Anscombe, G. E. M. (1974) On certainty: Über Gewissheit. 1st edn. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pharos. 