History as a method not a truth:

How internet and celluloid conspiracy theory challenges concepts of historical

literacy

Robert ParkesUniversity of Newcastle

James GouldingUniversity of Sydney

Why are we interested inconspiracy theories?

• Historical Denial as Conspiracy Theory

• Decoding DaVinci – Fiction as History

• Navigating rival histories (history, fiction, film, hagiography, historical denial, rival narratives, conspiracy theories)

• Wineburg and ‘cognitive flexibility’

• Are existing ways of understanding historical literacy adequate for dealing with conspiracy theory?

What do existing ways of thinking about historical literacy assume?

• Literacy is acquired through learning the discipline (historical methodology).

• A level of threshold knowledge may be required to evaluate sources. (Schüllerqvist, 2013)

• Readers may switch between different reading frameworks. (Gottlieb & Wineburg, 2012)

What is Conspiracy Theory?

• A secret plan on the part of a group to influence events partly by covert action. (Pigden, 1995, p.5)

• A proposed explanation of some historical event (or events) in terms of the significant casual agency of a relatively small group of persons – the conspirators – acting in secret. (Keeley, 1999, p.116)

• A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of an historical event, in which conspiracy (ie. agents acting secretly in concert) has a significant casual role. Furthermore, the conspiracy postulated . . . Must be a conspiracy to bring about the historical event which it purports to explain. Finally the proposed explanation must conflict with an ‘official’ version of the same historical event. (Coady, 2006, p.117)

Three problems for conspiracy theorists

• The fundamental attribution error – over-estimating the importance of dispositional factors and underestimating the significance of situational factors (Clarke, 2002).

• Unfalsifiability of their theories (Basham, 2006).

• Holding on to theories that should otherwise be abandoned. [A progressive research program is one in which novel predictions are made that are generally successful. In a degenerating research program, successful novel predictions are not made. Instead, auxiliary hypotheses and initial conditions are successively modified in light of new evidence, to protect the original theory from apparent disconfirmation.] (Clarke, 2002).

Why do people believeconspiracy theories?

• The social nature of CT and the 'culture of conspiracism’.

• Conspiracies are presented as based on ‘more evidence’ than ‘received histories’. (Clarke, 2002) – all theories have errant data (Coady, 2006).

 • Interested in not just what CT is (common epistemological elements etc) but

why people believe it, and what are the implications for educators? A lot of the literature focuses on the peculiar epistemological nature of CT, but a look at its development over time reveals it to be a profoundly social phenomenon (Byford, 2011).

• CT as a reaction to postmodernism, rather than a product of it (strictly speaking CT, being a reaction to PM, is still a product of it, but driving force is different). CT as the everyday epistemological quick fix to complex historical problems.

• The CT industry – multi faceted, mutually supportive discursive and rhetorical 'webs'. Print, film, internet (static web sites and social media).

Holocaust Denial & Conspiracy Theory(Coady, 2003, p. 205)

Implications for Educators

• The way we have been educating students may inadvertently be making them more (not less) susceptible to the claims of CT.

• How to respond?

ReconceptualisingCritical Historiography

• Traditional critical historiography is good tool for unpacking the claims of CT, but it tends to be limited to textual analysis. Until now, the most common arena for the refutation of CT has been in books and journal articles.

• CT targets context sensitive vulnerabilities in multiple mediums, therefore the response must also be context sensitive.

• Taking traditional historical analysis a step further – introduce the notion of meta-disciplinary historiographic knowledge as a conceptual framework that is more responsive to mechanisms and mediums of contemporary CT than traditional historiography.

• On the web - consider ethos: combining new media literacy with traditional historiography.

Future Directions

• Synthesising research from multiple disciplines into a coherent and comprehensive framework

• Importance of meta-disciplinary perspectives (meta-history / historiography).

• Empirical assessment of how readers tell the difference between conspiracy theory and ‘authentic’ history; and how conspiracy theorists ‘read’ historical narratives.