Rumour Has It, David Coady
Coady, David, ‘Rumour Has It,’ International Journal of Applied Philosophy,Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2006
p. 41 - It occurs to me that in this discussion of ‘rumour’ that we might be dealing with two forms of communication, one ‘good,’ one ‘bad,’ both conflated as this thing called ‘rumour.’ The same could, of course, be said in re CTs.
I think Coady’s argument is, contra CAJ Coady, is that rumour is testimony adverse to someone rather than being a species of pathological testimony.
p. 42 - The difference between rumour and gossip:
‘To begin with, for a communication to be a rumour, it must have ‘spread’ through a number of informants (i.e., rumour-mongers). This is one difference between rumour and gossip. Gossip may well be first-hand. By contrast, no first-hand account of an event can be a rumour, though it may later become one.Furthermore, the number of informants through which a rumour has spread must be quite large. No second-hand account of an event can be a rumour, though it may be more of a rumour than a first-hand account. In general, the further a rumour has spread, the more fully it deserves the name.’
Gives the usual story as to why we think rumour is unreliable; transmission as increasing the inaccuracy of the information (which goes against the widely held belief of how oral histories ‘preserve’).
p. 43-4 - Experiments designed to show how inadequate rumour is have been badly designed; people in the chain of transmission were unable to question the rumours they were told and the information was transmitted in a unilinear fashion. Thus the experiments do not give people the tools of questioning and coherence that we might expect in situations where rumours are being transmitted.
p. 44 - This could be rewritten to be about CTs:
‘Allport and Postman conceive of rumour-mongers as entirely passive in the face of the information they are given. They are like imperfect recording and transmitting devices, through whom information, like noise, is gradually distorted. But each of the above points shows that people have resources available to them, if they are prepared to use them, to do more than merely produce an inferior version of what they have heard. They are able to use any or all of these resources to get the story straight in their own mind, and thus minimise distortion. They are also able to evaluate the internal consistency of the story itself, as well as its consistency with other things they already know. This in turn puts them in a position to reject parts of the story that are unlikely to be true, modify other parts that are unlikely to be wholly true, and add new information on the basis of plausible hypotheses about how the story came to be modified in the telling. This suggests that not only is it not inevitable that rumours will become increasingly distorted as they spread, there is a realistic possibility of them becoming more accurate as they spread.’
p. 47 - Coady presents what I feel is a bit of a wacky truth criterion for the veracity of rumours (allthough I suppose I need to work out what he means by ‘truth’ here). He argues that if you hear a rumour then this is prima facie evidence that it is effective at surviving and spreading; this also shows it must be reasonably plausible. This is further backed up by the notion that we take into account the speaker as well as the content of their utterances. So if you hear a rumour you not only hear reliable information but reliable information a lot of reliable people felt was reliable.
This is meant to show that we should treat rumours as being prima facie true.
p. 48 - The above does fit into the notions we have about the veracity of oral history.
‘Nonetheless it does contain the valuable insight that rumours are essentially unofficial things. No public statement by a government or a government agency, for example, no matter how far removed it was from an original eyewitness account, could be a rumour (though, of course, it could confirm a pre-existing rumour or be responsible for starting another rumour).’
p. 48-9 - Makes an explicit link to CTs. Runs the Openness Objection reply to rumour as to why we might not treat rumours as prima facie unjustified; in the right kind of society rumours might be more reliable than official information.
p. 49 - ‘Second, even if you do have good reason to trust the veracity of official communications in your society, and hence to adopt a sceptical attitude to conspiracy theories, this does not automatically translate into a reason for adopting a sceptical attitude to rumours, because rumours, unlike conspiracy theories, need not actually contradict any official communications. The absence of official verification is essential to a rumour, but that does not entail the presence of official refutation (or even denial). Quite often officialdom will have no interest in the content of a rumour, and even when it does have an interest in quashing a rumour, it may choose not to deny it, because there is evidence that denial (and even refutation) can be counterproductive. So, even if you are confident that you can trust officials to tell the truth, you may still reasonably believe rumours, because you do not trust them to tell the whole truth.’
p. 50 - A kind of reply to my first point:
‘If we make rumours unreliable by fiat, we face the challenge of explaining what distinguishes rumour from other unreliable communications in a way that leaves rumour as the interesting and important concept it clearly is. I don’t see how that can be done.’
Mentions that some ‘bad’ rumours might survive if they fulfil, say, a psychological need. Uses the example of Urban Legends as a species of this type.
