Conspiracy Theorists and Appreciating Evidence_preprint

Debates on the rationality of endorsing conspiracy theories often focus on the primary evidence conspiracy theorists have: errant data, eyewitnesses, revealed documentation and the kind of facts typical investigators would use. Once we focus on the appreciation of this primary evidence, a significant portion of conspiracy theorists (most Flat-Earthers for example), turn out not to appreciate their primary evidence. They use evidence that, in fact, does not support their beliefs at all. Thus, if we only focus on primary evidence, we would be forced to posit a deep kind of irrationality in order to explain how these conspiracy theorists arrive at their beliefs. We propose a more palatable alternative on which (the appreciation of) secondary evidence plays a crucial role in the formation of conspiratorial beliefs: conspiracy theorists often don’t (just) rely on primary evidence, they also rely on testimonies that point out to them what such evidence (supposedly) supports. While there often still is something irrational to accepting poorly supported conspiracy theories, that irrationality is no longer blatant. We compare our approach to other social epistemological alternatives in the literature and argue that it is descriptively more accurate and normatively more satisfying.