M. Giulia Napolitano describes belief in many conspiracy theories as exhibiting ‘extreme stickiness’. Advocates of these conspiracy theories can seem impervious to the influence of evidence that tells against their favoured theory. They fail to abandon belief when an impartial party would. Napolitano describes conspiracy theories as ‘self-insulated’ to help explain their stickiness. As she points out, many conspiracy theorists dismiss opponents of their favoured theory either as having been taken in by a ‘cover-up’ designed to mislead or as being participants in the conspiracy. A major concern about this explanation for stickiness is that the conspiracy theorists who appeal to either cover-up or participation to defend their favoured theory from refutation are appealing to auxiliary hypotheses to account for a discrepancy between theory and evidence and it is widely accepted – per the Duhem-Quine thesis – that theories are never straightforwardly refuted by evidence and that the process of adding auxiliary hypotheses to theories can go on indefinitely. If this explanation is to succeed, we need to identify relevant differences between appeals to cover-ups and participation in conspiracies on the one hand and appeals to regular auxiliary hypotheses on the other. Here I explore prospects for the identification of such differences.
