What Did Lemert Mean and Does It Matter: A Reply to Corzine.

This article presents a response to the comments made by Jay Corzine on the paper Conspiracy, Paranoia, and the Problem of Knowledge, by Charles W. Lidz. Corzine seems to want to define Lemert's empirical assertions and methods. My objections, however, are not primarily directed to either of these but to Lemert's approach to knowing the phenomenon, to his epistemology. Thus, Corzine objects to one of the two ways in which I suggest that one might go about assessing the objective existence of a conspiracy, namely, to use as a criterion the intentions of the actors involved. I proposed this only as one of the ways Lemert might have meant to assess the objective reality of the conspiracy, since it is a frequent criterion in interactionist sociology. My own position is clearly that it is a mistake to separate existence of a conspiracy from the way it is known, something required by any objective determination of whether or not a conspiracy is real. However, suppose for a moment, that I am wrong about what Lemert means and Corzine is right in every detail. Then it is hard to see why the paper is so widely thought to be important. Corzine's Lemert discovered only that sometimes people unite against people who are labelled paranoid but that this has no causal significance in the production of paranoia. Since Corzine's Lemert believes that conspiracy is a frequent occurrence in U.S. Organizations, there is no reason to believe it occurs more often to people labelled paranoid than to those who are not. While this position can argue that the paranoid has grounds for his feelings of persecution, so does just about everyone else. Corzine defends Lemert by condemning him to triviality.