Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

I discuss Timothy Williamson’s approach to philosophical methodology in Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy, and its consequences for theories of belief, content, and what is said. I’ll argue that a medium-grained approach to these issues, situated in-between classical intensionalism and impossible worlds hyperintensionalism, is worth taking seriously.

To a large extent, recent debates on conspiracy theories have been based on what we call the “doxastic assumption”. According to that assumption, a person who supports a conspiracy theory believes that the theory is (likely to be) true, or at least equally plausible as the “official explanation”. In this paper we argue that the doxastic assumption does not always hold. There are, indeed, “non-doxastic conspiracy theories”: theories that have many supporters who do not really believe in their truth or likelihood. One implication of this view is that some…