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
Admitting in a CNN interview on September 15 that the claim was false (he had also made it before Trump, knowing its falsity after a call to Springfield’s Republican major), the current US Vice President JD 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”. Both Trump’s and his own utterances about Springfield lacked assertoric commitments; they were just fictions, even if, as such, they were meant to convey assertoric commitment to some general claims (say, that immigrants cause much suffering to US citizens)
Some philosophers have recently defended this sort of view about conspiracy theories. Ichino (2022) argues that they are fictions in the somehow revisionary way articulated by Kendall Walton (1990); while Munro & Rini (forthcoming) argue that “conspiracy theorizing is a form of shared, participatory storytelling”. While the latter at least accept that some storytelling is done with assertoric force, 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 theorists, and that the fictionalist accounts have unacceptable normative implications.
