Brian L. Keeley (2023), In D. Collins, I. Vidmar Jovanović and M. Alfano (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Trust, Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 197–214 — DOI-10.5040/9781978734494.ch-011
Key takeaways
- Public Trust Skepticism — discounting conspiracy theories because they erode trust in institutions — gets things backwards: for an important class of theories it is the sweeping distrust they presuppose that undermines their own credibility, by leading to “epistemic nihilism”.
Seeded from the abstract alone, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Keeley asks how belief in, or engagement with, conspiracy theories relates to trust, and whether it erodes trust in others and especially in public institutions. He targets “Public Trust Skepticism”, the thesis that conspiracy theories deserve less credibility because they undermine citizens’ trust in democratic institutions. He argues that for an important class of conspiracy theories the reverse holds: the broad distrust of public sources that such theories presuppose is what undermines them, because it makes much of what their proponents would otherwise believe incoherent — a condition he calls epistemic nihilism.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 5 seconds of active reading over 1 session. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: low — t=5s, closed access, and the thesis is stated in the abstract.
What a deeper reading should check:
- Check how it relates to Keeley’s “Of Conspiracy Theories” (1999), which as I recall located the problem in the pervasive skepticism such theories require — the chapter may be a refinement rather than a reversal.
- Epistemic nihilism as self-undermining global distrust bears on how trust in information sources, including AI systems, should be calibrated.
- Companion to LIT-203 (Keeley 2024 on conspiracy liars). Tagging gap: the subject is social epistemology, which the vocabulary cannot name.
Access when seeded: philpapers is blocked here; resolved via a Crossref bibliographic search (chapter DOI, pp. 197–214, year 2023 with no day). OpenAlex lists it as closed access. The abstract below combines the tracker’s captured opening with a search-engine summary of the PhilPapers abstract, which is secondhand and not read at source. A YouTube talk by Keeley with the same title exists but was not watched. The exact date is unverified (Crossref and OpenAlex give only 2023).