The Conspiracy Image of the World
Abstract
This paper proposes an interpretation of conspiracy theories based on the resumption and updating of Sellarsian conceptual frameworks. Alongside the conflict between the two well-known images of the world proposed by Sellars, the manifest one and the scientific one, I suggest the existence of a conspiratorial image of reality. In order to justify this proposal, I firstly analyze the way in which Sellars defines the notion of conceptual framework and, subsequently, the philosophy of language on which the same notion is based. In this way are also presented the concepts of inference and postulation which are pivotal for the construction of conceptual schemes. The idea that there are unfounded postulations is then proposed, demonstrating at the same time how these are at the basis of the conspiracy narratives and the image of the world that derives from them.
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