Abstract: On September 10, 2024, during the Harris-Trump ABC presidential debate, Donald Trump uttered (i):
(i) In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there
The current US Vice President JD Vance had made these allegations about Haitian legal immigrants living in Springfield on the social network X before Trump, although the Republican city manager of Springfield had told his staff that they were “baseless”. US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called Vance’s comments “dangerous” and a “conspiracy theory… based on an element of racism”. Now, admitting in a CNN interview on September 15 that the claim was false (a “cat meme”), Vice President Vance said that “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do”. Vance suggests here that both Trump’s and his own utterances about Springfield’s immigrants lacked assertoric commitment: they were just fictions (created “stories”), even if, as such, they were meant to convey assertoric commitment to some general claims (say, that immigrants cause much suffering to US citizens).
Vance is not alone in characterizing his “conspiracy theory” as just a fiction. Some philosophers working on the topic argue that this is indeed what conspiracy theories (the term understood pejoratively, so that they don’t just posit an explanatory conspiracy like the official explanation of 9/11 but are manifestly epistemically deficient) in general are. Thus, Ichino (2022, forthcoming) defends that they are fictions in the somehow revisionary sense articulated by Kendall Walton; while Munro & Rini (forthcoming) argue that “conspiracy theorizing is a form of shared, participatory storytelling”. While Munro & Rini accept that some storytelling is done with assertoric commitment, they emphasize cases in which it is meant as just fiction. In support of their views, these authors point out that conspiracy theorists don’t show a very strong belief attachment to their views – sometimes accepting inconsistent theories – and fail to act on the basis of their conspiracy theories, among other considerations. In my talk I’ll argue that the data is compatible with a straightforward assertoric commitment to their theories by conspiracy theories, and that the fictionalist accounts have unacceptable normative implications.
