Conspire synonym frame12/11/2023 Not surprisingly, the expression ‘conspiracy theory’ seems to carry with it a negative value. 2016), and to be used as instruments of political propaganda (Muirhead and Rosenblum 2019 Cassam 2019). In both public and academic discourse, conspiracy theories are often taken to undermine trust in institutions and to hinder the spread of information (for instance, Vermeule and Sunstein 2009 Dieguez et al. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression-such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’-to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory.ĭiscussions of conspiracy theories pervade internet forums, social media, and the news. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda.
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