Fake News, Conspiracy Theorizing, and Intellectual Vice

Abstract

This collection of 19 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time and written by an international team of established and emerging scholars, explores the place of intellectual virtues and vices in a social world. Relevant virtues include open-mindedness, curiosity, intellectual courage, diligence in inquiry, and the like. Relevant vices include dogmatism, need for immediate certainty, and gullibility and the like.The chapters are divided into four key sections: Foundational Issues; Individual Virtues; Collective Virtues; and Methods and Measurements. And the chapters explore the most salient questions in these areas of research, including: How are individual intellectual virtues and vices affected by their social contexts? Does being in touch with other openminded people make us more open-minded? Conversely, does connection to other dogmatic people make us more dogmatic? Can groups possess virtues and vices distinct from those of their members? For instance, could a group of dogmatic individuals operate in an open-minded way despite the vices of its members?Each chapter receives commentary from two other authors in the volume, and each original author then replies to these commentaries. Together, the authors form part of a collective conversation about how we can know about what we know. In so doing, they not only theorize but enact social virtue epistemology.

Open-mindedness predicts support for public health measures and disbelief in conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…This finding suggests that different epistemic dispositions, one stemming from seeking out and positively valuing interactions with others and the other stemming from avoiding and devaluing interactions with others, differentially support adopting public health related beliefs and behaviors or conspiracy beliefs respectively. Previous work has found that people who score low on open-mindedness are more likely to accept a range of both medical and non-medical conspiracy theories and fake news [31]. Furthermore, epistemic vice, construed in terms of dispositions to be apathetic about evidence and rigid in one's beliefs, appears to be an even-more powerful predictor of acceptance of Covid-19 myths [32,33].…”

Some vices of vice epistemology

“…Epistemic insouciance is not the only epistemic vice that has been posited to explain epistemic misconduct in political contexts. Marco Meyer characterizes intellectual virtues as “character traits that support their bearers in gaining knowledge and understanding,” whereas “intellectual vices are deficits in intellectual virtue” (2019, 9). Examples of the latter include intellectual vanity and arrogance.…”

“…The explanation is ideological, since there is plenty of empirical evidence that “people's political ideologies play a strong role in determining which conspiracy theories they will subscribe to” (Uscinski and Parent 2014, 12). However, while Meyer does not deny that politics plays a part in explaining belief in conspiracy theories, he insists that his intellectual vice explanation “has explanatory power over and above established explanations appealing to religiosity and political orientation” (2019, 17). Hence, the challenge is to explain belief in conspiracy theories in a way that does justice to the sheer multiplicity of explanatory factors.…”

Some problems with particularism

“…( 2016 , p. 2, emphasis added ) Moreover, while there are few if any avowed generalists, large swaths of academic work take a critical stance toward belief in conspiracy theories. This work principally takes the form of psychological research (Abalakina-Paap et al, 1999 ; Brotherton & French, 2014 ; Cichocka et al, 2016 ; Darwin et al, 2011 ; Douglas et al, 2016 ; Swami et al, 2011 ; Van Prooijen, 2018 ; Van Prooijen et al, 2018 ) and explorations of the connections between epistemic vice and belief in conspiracy theories (Cassam, 2016 ; Harris, 2018 ; Meyer, 2019 ). That such work is routinely challenged by particularists (Basham & Dentith, 2018 ; Basham, 2018b ; Hagen, 2018 , 2020 ) suggests that particularists are concerned not only to defend conspiracy theories, but to defend belief in conspiracy theories.…”