Skalą optymizmu poznawczego a Kwestionariuszem mentalności spiskowej, Skalą potrzeby poznawczego domknięcia oraz Trójwymiarową skalą prawicowego autorytaryzmu . .

Czym jest teoria spiskowa?Wyrażenie "teoria spiskowa" nie posiada jednego powszechnie przyjętego przez naukowców znaczenia, ponieważ autorzy tworzący rozmaite definicje i typologie są badaczami należącymi do odmiennych dyscyplin i patrzą na przedmiot swoich badań z odrębnych perspektyw. Inaczej rozumieją wyrażenie "teoria spiskowa" psychologowie, którzy budują skale myślenia spiskowego, a inaczej filozofowie, którzy zastanawiają się nad ich wiarygodnością. Termin ten jest również nieostry, a więc rozstrzygnięcie, czy dany zbiór twierdzeń jest teorią spiskową może przysporzyć kłopotów.#0# * Szymon Makuła -dr, adiunkt w Instytucie Filozofii Uniwersytetu Śląskiego. Interesuje się krytycznym myśleniem, teorią argumentacji, logiką nieformalną i metodologią nauk.

In one of his papers, Moti Mizrahi argues that arguments from an expert opinion are weak arguments. His thesis may seem controversial due to the consensus on this topic in the field of informal logic. I argue that its controversy is framework-dependent, and if translated into a different framework, it appears to be a correct, however trivial, claim. I will use a framework based on Douglas Walton’s argumentation scheme theory and his conception of examination dialogue to demonstrate that it is so. It appears that Mizrahi’s idiosyncratic framework provides an excessively restrictive conception of an argument from expert opinion than Walton’s scheme does. There is no quarrel between both frameworks, as they yield analogous, almost identical, outcomes of argument evaluation. The actual and crucial disagreement is on the topic of argument classification. Mizrahi’s conception of arguments from an expert opinion imposes exact conditions that such argument must fulfil: an expert’s opinion o truth-value must be unknown; o must be unsupported by any evidence; an expert’s peers neither accept o nor reject it. These exclude, by definition, every possible strong, in Walton’s terms, variant of such an argument. Therefore, if rephrased with the notions of the examination dialogue framework, Mizrahi’s thesis sounds as follows: weak arguments from expert opinion are weak arguments.

This paper's primary purpose is to show that there is a peculiar alternative to scientism whose central thesis is not about sources of knowledge or the existence of various objects, but it aims at setting out a strategy to help decide which of the two mutually exclusive beliefs is the better one to adopt. Scientophilia, to coin a term, recommends preferring, without any discussion, a position consistent with the consensus of credible and reliable experts in a given domain. In case there is no such agreement, mainly because peers disagree with each other, or experts are difficult to identify, it is recommended for a scientophile to suspend judgment. Scientophilia is not a position on science or human knowledge boundaries, but it deals with the practical side of belief change. Verdicts made by this approach are partially similar to those offered by mild scientism, as scientophilia puts scientific knowledge as one of the most reliable sources. However, it is also consistent with mild antiscientism, as in some particular cases (for example, Moorean truths), it assigns reliable expertise to non-scientific experts. Therefore it is a third way.