Conspiracy theories often turn out to be true

The argument

One answer to why people believe conspiracy theories is that some conspiracy theories are true, and that believers are responding to this rather than failing to reason. Conspiracies do occur: groups do sometimes act in secret and deny it afterwards, and the claim that they are doing so is a claim that can turn out to be correct. The example offered is Watergate. The allegation that the Nixon administration was engaged in a coordinated covert operation was initially dismissed as a conspiracy theory and ridiculed by the administration itself, which is to say that at the time it carried the standard markers of the genre: an accusation of organised secret wrongdoing, denied by those accused and not credited by respectable opinion. It was only when the scandal was uncovered by journalists that it was revealed as a real conspiracy. On this account the belief was not vindicated by becoming more reasonable; it was reasonable already, and what changed was that the evidence surfaced. The inference drawn from this is that the general presumption against such theories is itself the error. People often assume a conspiracy theory is false simply because of the kind of claim it is, but that assumption is not supported by the record, since claims of that kind have sometimes been correct. Proponents of this position go further and argue that one proven conspiracy is evidence bearing on others: the existence of one speaks to the existence of another, because it establishes that powerful actors are willing and able to coordinate in secret and that official denial is not proof of innocence. On this reasoning, believing conspiracy theories is not a lapse but the rational response to a world in which they sometimes turn out to be true. People believe them, on this account, because they are true.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Just as conspiracy theories may be true, they may not. This Argument does not explain the number of people who believe in huge amounts of conspiracy theories. While it is not impossible that some conspiracy theories are true, many people believe in many of them, or in ones that are blatantly untrue. People even believe in conspiracy theories that actively contradict each other. Conspiracy theories cannot all or even mostly be true; there must be something more to conspiracy belief.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Just because not all conspiracy theories are untrue doesn't mean that believing in them becomes the logical choice.