Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The most usual philosophical questions about compromises have been those related to inter-personal compromises, in which parties are compromising with each other, rather than intra-personal compromises, which are often psychologically demanding. This paper aims to fill the gap in the discussion and briefly analyze the nature of intra-personal compromises. The starting point here is the assumption that inter-personal compromises cannot be made without intra-personal compromises, although intra-personal compromises are common even when they are not linked to inter-personal compromises. The main question addressed in the paper is whether the intra-personal…

The philosophical interest in political conspiracy theories is a rather recent phenomenon. Although philosophers have always been interested in conspiracies—Niccolò Machiavelli and David Hume, for example, studied them—not much has been written about conspiracy theories. However, conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing have recently gathered a considerable amount of attention among a number of disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, history, law, psychology and political science. This special issue of Argumenta delves into the ethical and epistemological questions of political conspiracy theories.

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…