Studying conspiracy theories
Others say forget it, because the foil actually acts as an antenna which allows a better signal.
Whether it be about clandestine government plans, chemtrails from high-flying jets, the JFK assassination, the moon landings, climate change or the origins of the Covid-19 virus, a visiting philosopher at the University of Otago says New Zealanders and Australians are far more likely to investigate the veracity of the claims than other countries around the world.
Beijing Normal University philosophy associate professor M Dentith is in Dunedin for the next month to share their research and give talks about conspiracy theory, as part of the University of Otago Taylor Fellowship.
Their research concerns the social epistemology of conspiracy theory theory, as well as rumours, fake news and secrecy.
"If you look at the philosophical work that's been done on interest in conspiracy theories, both New Zealanders and Australians are more sympathetic to the notion that if someone asserts a conspiracy theory, we should probably check to see whether it's true or false, rather than just assuming it's false when we first hear it.
"So I'm going to go through the history of how that developed, some speculation as to why we have this more charitable view towards conspiracy theories and also how that has kind of affected the academic literature in the last 20 years."
People generally believed conspiracy theorising was a "bad intellectual activity", Assoc Prof Dentith said.
"I'm kind of pushing back on that claim by saying, just because you can generate a conspiracy theory to explain any given event, it doesn't necessarily tell you that the conspiracy theory is wrong.
"Conspiracy theories are true or false with respect to the evidence.
"It's only wrong if the evidence for this particular conspiracy theory ends up not supporting the conspiratorial conclusion."
They said scientists generated scientific theories all the time and then went into laboratories to test them.
"In the history of science, there are more false scientific theories than there have ever been true scientific theories.
"People speculate for a scientific hypothesis that might explain some phenomena, and then they discover that actually, most of them turn out to be false.
"Only a few scientific theories survive. And the same is going to be true for conspiracy theories as well."
Assoc Prof Dentith will give a public talk at 5.30pm next Tuesday, at the university's Burns 2 Theatre, titled "Is There Something in the Water? Conspiracy Theory Theory and the Antipodes", which will look at the history of people studying conspiracy theories in New Zealand and Australia.
john.lewis@odt.co.nz
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