Logical positivism and the idea that "<i>for a statement to hold meaning, it must be possible to verify its truthfulness empirically – with evidence from the senses,</i>" is a category error that leads to a lot of weird rabbit holes, but at least this one is interesting. R.M. Hare:<p>"<i>I must begin by confessing that, on the ground marked out by Flew, he seems to me to be completely victorious. I therefore shift my ground by relating another parable.</i><p>"<i><<A certain lunatic is convinced that all dons want to murder him. His friends introduce him to all the mildest and most respectable dons that they can find, and after each of them has retired, they say, 'You see, he doesn't really want to murder you; he spoke to you in a most cordial manner; surely you are convinced now?' But the lunatic replies, 'Yes, but that was only his diabolical cunning; he's really plotting against me the whole time, like the rest of them; I know it I tell you'. However many kindly dons are produced, the reaction is still the same.>></i><p>"<i>Now we say that such a person is deluded. But what is he deluded about? About the truth or falsity of an assertion? Let us apply Flew's test to him. There is no behavior of dons that can be enacted which he will accept as counting against his theory; and therefore his theory, on this test, asserts nothing. But it does not follow that there is no difference between what he thinks about dons and what most of us think about them-otherwise we should not call him a lunatic and ourselves sane, and dons would have no reason to feel uneasy about his presence in Oxford.</i><p>"<i>Let us call that, in which we differ from this lunatic, our respective bliks . He has an insane blik about dons; we have a sane one. It is important to realize that we have a sane one, not no blik at all; for there must be two sides to any argument - if he has a wrong blik , then those who are right about dons must have a right one. Flew has shown that a blik does not consist in an assertion or system of them; but nevertheless it is very important to have the right blik.</i>"<p>(<a href="https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/phil_of_religion_text/CHAPTER_8_LANGUAGE/RMHare-Reply-to-Flew.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/phil_of_re...</a>)<p>And Flew's reply is easily as interesting: <a href="https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/phil_of_religion_text/CHAPTER_8_LANGUAGE/Flew-Response-to-Hare.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/phil_of_re...</a>
If a blik is an "unfalsifiable but meaningful worldviews", I don't see how this applies to certain prominent conspiracy theories. It is easy to verify that a particular pizza parlor does or doesn't have a basement, for example.
Could only read the abstract, and looked up "blik." Bliks are like the underpinning assumptions for a frame of reference, or the begged questions of a given belief, maybe even the axioms of an ideology.
<p><pre><code> - US government poisoning alcohol during prohibition
- US government using dead baby body parts for radiation testing without consent of the parents
- US government giving Black people syphilis on purpose
- Operation paperclip
- US intel's heart attack gun
- Operation Mockingbird (CIA infiltrating media)
- US Air Force experimenting with pheromones as a weapon
- CIA funded Dalai Lama and related guerrilla forces
- polio vaccine spread a cancer-causing virus
- Operation Northwoods (US intelligence planned to stage a false flag operation in the USA and blame Cuban terrorists)
- Tobacco companies knew cigarette smoke was deadly
- FBI spying on John Lennon, Martin Luther King Junior, et al
- The entire US/Vietnam war, predicated on a golf of Tonkin "incident", which never happened
- Iran-Contras
- MK ULTRA
- PRISM (Snowden)
- weapons of mass destruction
- 9/11 having nothing to do with Iraq invasion
- Panama papers
- Vaccine passports
- Agenda 21/2030
</code></pre>
Honestly, the list goes on for so long that you would fill your disk with text before you exhausted it.<p>With this knowledge, you have to be woefully illogical to come to the blanket conclusion that "conspiracy theories" are just some form of ridiculous religion.<p>There are people who believe things that are totally ridiculous and unrealistic. There are idiots in all walks of life, but using those idiots to attempt to dismiss everything that you deem to be a "conspiracy theory" is as ridiculous as dismissing all comedians as "misogynistic racists" just because one comedian tells racist and misogynist jokes.
> The nature of religious belief is elemental to understanding the epistemological foundations of the conspiracy theorising worldview<p>Huh, this somewhat comports with my armchair idea that religion trains people to constantly deny reality and construct their own truths that are based in “faith,” and thus it makes them susceptible to conspiracy theories.<p>Blik is a new word for me. Looks like an interesting study.