[roleplayer]

The existence of covid was called a conspiracy theory at one point, the term is used so loosely that it has lost all meaning and just used as a sort of cognitive stop sign. You could say the widespread use of the term conspiracy theory to mean something other than literally a theory that there is a group conspiring about something is itself a conspiracy and it would be consistent with mainstream usage, blame the people who watered the term down to be meaningless

[mjburgess]

I havent experienced it being meaningless. I do see this comment often, and I universally encounter it said by conspiracy theorists or their apologists. Ie., those people with unjustified conspiracy narratives born of delusions of paranoia.

The 'theory' that china deliberately manufactured and released covid is a conspiracy theory. I have not seen COVID called one, nor even, the idea that a lab in china was researching it, nor that its release is accidental.

There being a pandemic, that a lab is somewhere researching COVID, that a lab may have accidentally released COVID do not contain any conspiracies.

The phrase is a very clear term of art in my view: a conspiracy theory is a story about how the world works which places implausible conspiracies at the heart of its causal structure; in the manner of movie plots; and presents a paranoid style of reasoning in which major events, and their distal effects, are the deliberate decisions of a small number of people.

Conspiracy theories, and theorists, are by definition engaged in an epistemic vice; a pseudoscientific activity of explanation; a kind of intellectualised schizoprehnia.