Conspiracy Theories
In our day-to-day lives, the search for the truth generally meets a fair amount of success. We usually find our missing car keys and figure out who ate our last piece of pizza. Most, though not all, crimes are solved and though the criminal justice system makes mistakes, we are generally satisfied that the punished are actually guilty. When a jetliner crashes we are often able to decide what the cause was, be it a bomb, the weather, pilot error, or whatever. We were even able to determine why one of the recent Mars probes burned up on entry into the Martian atmosphere; someone forgot to translate from meters to feet! Though answers to our questions are generally available, some of us are reluctant to believe them, no matter how reasonable they appear to be. Some of us are on the lookout for alternate answers that are most often less-reasonable. We’ll call these ‘alternate’ answers conspiracy theories, though not all actually involve a conspiracy. The links below offer information on conspiracy theories, both on specific theories and on the phenomena of conspiracy theories in general.
- What is it that causes some people to deny the reasonable answer and look for explanations that are more far-fetched? What assumptions are these conspiracy theorists making? What criteria for truth and evidence are they using? How do these criteria differ from those generally employed by science and common sense?
- Many of these conspiracy theories directly discount the accepted practice of using Ockham’s Razor. Is there something wrong with this principle?
- Are there similarities between the most common conspiracy theories? What are they and what conclusions do they lead you to believe about the phenomena of such theories?
Conspiracy Theories Discussion Forum
Conspiracy Theories- Great resource with lots of links
Links to various conspiracy theory texts
Blackops--The Robert Anton Wilson and Miriam Joan Hill Conspiracy Theory Homepage
