I don’t know much Roman history, and I don’t have a strong belief either way about the assassination. Wikipedia says more 60 senators were involved, but I don’t know what sources they use to arrive at that. I have no idea what percent of the Roman senate that comprises, or what percent would pass the threshold to say that “the Roman senate [was] involved in a conspiracy to kill Caesar”.
But my wife and I conspired to throw my daughter a birthday party, so there you have a conspiracy I believe in. Please feel free to use that fact as a premise in some explicit argument (taking into account that a ‘conspiracy theory’ is distinct from a theory about a conspiracy).
My wife and I intended for our conspiracy to throw our kid a birthday party to be discovered on the day of the party. Perhaps you are talking about a different kind of conspiracy?
This is an interesting turn. I would describe this as a loss of faith in a particular ‘conspiracy theory’ that pushed you further toward what I have been calling ‘conspiracy thinking’. That’s not to say that it’s necessarily irrational or unjustified, but unexpected for me.
Yes, I think those people are wrong. That isn’t an ad hominem argument. You’ll note that I didn’t use the words “immature” or “irrational”. Indeed, I have entertained the possibility that it’s my shift in belief that is irrational (or at least first-order irrational, driven by unconscious second-order reasons).
Feeling personally attacked when someone criticizes your beliefs or talks about the possibility that they could be wrong or that other may have been convinced that they are wrong, does not make those criticisms or discussions ad hominem.
I think that I was imprecise. What shifts something from a conspiracy theory to general knowledge is that the conspiracy theory is shown to be correct, by the accumulation and exposition of reliable evidence. Gloominary provides a good example of this with the Gulf of Tonkin example. If, prior to the release of the Pentagon Papers, someone believed based on the publicly available information that there was a government conspiracy to defraud the public in order to get us into a war, it would have been a conspiracy theory, in part because we didn’t have very good reason to believe that. When the Pentagon Papers came out and we suddenly did have good reason, it becomes general knowledge and not a conspiracy theory.
I do think this reveals a weakness in my position: it’s a a no-true-scotsman argument, where belief on bad evidence is part of what defines a conspiracy theory, and so conspiracy theories are by definition not support by evidence. I think this is the same “unfalsifiability” you have pointed out.
But then isn’t any cognitive bias susceptible to the same reply? Suppose some recognized cognitive bias leads us to conclude that X is the case 80% of the time, when it’s actually only the case 10% of the time. It’s still legitimate then to say that it is the cognitive bias that led us to believe that X is the case, and yet it is also true that X is the case.
So too can something be a conspiracy theory, and someone’s belief in the conspiracy theory be attributable to unreliable conspiracy thinking, and yet the set of facts alleged in the conspiracy theory may be true, and upon being supported by more reliable evidence, would become general knowledge.