From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Sun Jun 01 2003 - 15:05:05 MDT
SKEPTICISM TODAY
The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the
false appearance of things present and which mislead into error, not
directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived
opinion, by prejudice. Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
(17881860)
In 1993, the late parapsychologist Charles Honorton from the
University of Edinburgh considered what skeptics of psi experiments
used to claim, and what they no longer claimed. He demonstrated that
virtually all of the skeptical arguments used to explain away psi
over the years had been resolved through design of new experiments.
This does not mean the experiments conducted today are "perfect,"
because there is nothing perfect in the empirical sciences. But it
does mean that the methods available today satisfy the most rigorous
skeptical requirements for providing "exceptional evidence." As
we've seen, such experiments have been conducted, with successful
results.
WHAT SKEPTICS USED TO CLAIM
Honorton pointed out that for many decades the standard skeptical
assertion was that psi was impossible because it violated some ill-
specified physical laws, or because the effects were not repeatable.
It was also easy to claim that any successful experiments were
really due to chance or fraud. Today, informed skeptics no longer
claim that the outcomes of psi experiments are due to mere chance
because we know that some parapsychological effects are, to use
skeptical psychologist Ray Hyman's words, "astronomically
significant." This is a key concession because it shifts the focus
of the debate away from the mere existence of interesting effects to
their proper interpretation.
The concession also drops the decades-long skeptical questions over
the legitimacy of parapsychology as a science. It states, quite
clearly, that skeptics who continue to repeat the same old
assertions that parapsychology is a pseudoscience, or that there are
no repeatable experiments, are not only uninformed about the state
of parapsychology, they are also uninformed about the current state
of skepticism!
Honorton then pointed out that skeptics no longer claim that there
are any meaningful relationships between design flaws and
experimental outcomes. This criticism was again based on the premise
that psi did not exist, thus any psi effects observed in experiments
must have been due to sloppy experimenters, flawed techniques or
poor measurements. The assertion implied that if a scientist
performed the proper, "perfect" psi experiment, that all claims for
psi effects would disappear. The basic argument is flawed, of
course, because all measurements contain some error. Nevertheless,
the assertion is testable by comparing experimental outcomes with
assessments of experimental quality. As we've seen, the meta-
analyses described earlier have shown that design flaws cannot
account for the cumulative success rates in psi experiments.
The skeptics are not eager to advertise their recent concessions.
Over the past few decades Ray Hyman and other "professional"
skeptics have tried with great creativity and diligence to explain
away psi. They tried to show that the experiments were not really
all that interesting, and that all of the apparently successful
studies were due to one or another design flaws. Having failed on
both counts, informed skeptics have been forced to admit that they
have simply run out of plausible explanations.
It is not easy to change life-long, strongly held beliefs, even when
there is strong evidence that the belief is wrong, so the publicly
proclaimed skeptics are not likely to ever admit that psi per se is
genuine. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that the focus
of today's controversy has significantly shifted from the flat
dismissals of the past.
WHAT SKEPTICS NOW CLAIM
Because no plausible explanations remain for the experimental
results, today the few remaining hard-core skeptics rehash the same
old polemical arguments used in past decades. The core assertion is
the tired claim that after 100 years of research, parapsychology has
failed to provide convincing evidence for psi phenomena.
This argument follows a certain logic. Skeptics refuse to believe
that psi experiments, which they admit are successfully
demonstrating something, are in fact actually demonstrating psi
itself. By stubbornly insisting that the results are real and
unexplainable on the one hand, but those results could not possibly
be due to psi on the other, then of course they can claim that
parapsychology is a failure. This is like a skeptic who refuses to
call a group of nine players who win the World Series a "baseball
team." In that case, the skeptic can simply smile, shrug and
doggedly claim that yes, people do apparently go running after balls
that other people occasionally hit with a bat. But still, after 100
years there is no solid evidence that anything called a baseball
team actually exists.
Remember that most parapsychologists do not claim to understand
what "psi" is. Instead, they design experiments designed to test
experiences that people have reported throughout history. If
rigorous tests for what we have called "telepathy" results in
effects that look like, sound like, and feel like the experiences
reported in real life, then call it what you will, but the
experiments confirm that this common experience is not an illusion.
Another way to demonstrate the purely rhetorical nature of
the "century of failure" argument is to see if the same argument
also applies to conventional academic psychology. After a hundred
years and thousands of experiments, there are still vigorous
controversies over such elementary phenomena as conscious awareness,
memory, learning, and perception. After a hundred years, psychology
has not produced even the crudest model of how processes in the
brain are transformed into conscious experience. If we adopt the
skeptics' reasoning, many of whom are psychologists, then
conventional psychology is also a dismal failure.
AN UNUSUAL CONTROVERSY
After deftly exposing and dissolving the skeptical position,
Honorton then pointed out an important difference between the
controversy over psi and debates in more conventional disciplines.
Most scientific debates occur within groups of researchers who test
hypotheses, develop and critique other researchers' methods, and
collect data to test their hypotheses. This is standard operating
procedure, as witnessed by persistent debates over dozens of hot
topics in all scientific disciplines. The same sort of vigorous
debating is evident in the journals and at the annual meetings of
the Parapsychological Association, the professional society of
scientists and scholars interested in psi phenomena.
However, the psi controversy is different in one important respect.
The vast majority of skeptics often write about the plausibility of
various alternative hypotheses, but they almost never test their
ideas. This "armchair quarterbacking" is especially true of the
current generation of psi skeptics, the vast majority of whom have
made no original research contributions to this topic.
Their reasoning is simple: If you start from the position that an
effect cannot exist, then why bother going to all the time and
expense to actually study it? It makes more sense to use every
rhetorical trick in the book to convince others that your opinion is
correct, and that all the evidence to the contrary is somehow
flawed. This may seem like a perfectly reasonable strategy, but it
is not science. It is much closer to an argument based on faith,
like a religious position.
The fact that most skeptics do not conduct counter-studies to prove
their claims is not well known. For example, in 1983 the well known
skeptic Martin Gardner wrote the following:
How can the public know that for fifty years skeptical psychologists
have been trying their best to replicate classic psi experiments,
and with notable unsuccess [sic]? It is this fact more than any
other that has led to parapsychology's perpetual stagnation.
Positive evidence keeps coming from a tiny group of enthusiasts,
while negative evidence keeps coming from a much larger group of
skeptics. As Honorton points out, "Gardner does not attempt to
document this assertion, nor could he. It is pure fiction. Look for
the skeptics' experiments and see what you find." In addition,
there is no "larger group of skeptics." There are perhaps 10 to 15
skeptics who have accounted for the vast bulk of the published
criticisms.
Beyond the "century of failure" argument, some skeptics still
stubbornly insist that parapsychology is not a "real science." As
Ray Hyman wrote,
Every science except parapsychology builds upon its previous data.
The data base continually expands with each new generation but the
original investigations are still included. In parapsychology, the
data base expands very little because previous experiments are
continually discarded and new ones take their place.
This isn't true, because otherwise the meta-analyses described in
this book wouldn't exist. As we've seen, the early tests on
thought-transference gave rise to picture-drawing telepathy tests.
They spawned telepathy experiments in the dream state, which later
led to the ganzfeld experiments. The dice tests begat RNG
experiments. All of these experimental variations evolved as
researchers took stock of previous experimental outcomes and
criticisms and refined their test designs and theories.
Of course, some skeptics have made important contributions to the
development of progressively stronger evidence by systematically
ferreting out design loop-holes, and by insisting upon stronger and
stronger empirical evidence. But because skeptics today can no
longer demonstrate plausible alternative explanations, all that
remains is rhetoric and defense of a priori beliefs. Persisting in
this stance in the face of overwhelming evidence has produced some
excellent examples of minds struggling with logical contradictions.
Honorton summarized his view of the state of skepticism as follows:
There is a danger for science in encouraging self-appointed
protectors who engage in polemical campaigns that distort and
misrepresent serious research efforts. Such campaigns are not only
counterproductive, they threaten to corrupt the spirit and function
of science and raise doubts about its credibility. The distorted
history, logical contradictions, and factual omissions exhibited in
the arguments of the
critics represent neither scholarly
criticism nor skepticism, but rather counteradvocacy masquerading as
skepticism.
SKEPTICAL TACTICS
Extreme skeptics who believe that all psi experiments are flawed
have used an effective bag of rhetorical tactics to try to convince
others to dismiss the evidence. These include accusations that even
if real, psi effects are so weak that they are trivial or
uninteresting, statements of frank prejudice, long lists of common
but scientifically invalid criticisms, and severely distorted
descriptions of psi experiments which make psi researchers appear to
be incompetent. Let's examine how some these tactics have been
used.
ACCUSATIONS OF TRIVIALITY
Some skeptics have reluctantly accepted that psi effects may be
genuine. But then they attempted to reduce their discomfort by
claiming that psi is simply too weak to be interesting. For example,
the psychologist E. G. Boring wrote that ESP data were merely "an
empty correlation," and psychologist S. S. Stevens asserted
that "the signal-to-noise ratio for ESP is simply too low to be
interesting."
More recently, the skeptical British psychologist Susan Blackmore
wrote "What if my doubt is displaced and there really is
extrasensory perception after all? What would this tell us about
consciousness?" To answer this question, Blackmore took a giant step
backwards to the 1950s psychological fad of behaviorism, and
concluded that consciousness doesn't have any meaning at all,
that it is merely an illusion. Not surprisingly then, she also
concluded that psi, even if genuine, would tell us nothing at all
about the nature of consciousness. This is a perplexing position
that hardly anyone accepts anymore, not even other hard-nosed
skeptics.
In another example of trivializing psi, mathematician A. J. Ayer
wrote in Scientific American,
The only thing that is remarkable about the subject who is credited
with extra-sensory perception is that he is consistently rather
better at guessing cards than the ordinary run of people have shown
themselves to be. The fact that he also does "better than chance"
proves nothing in itself.
Such an assertion is confused, because any form of genuine psi, weak
or strong, carries revolutionary potential for our understanding of
the natural world. In addition, effects that are originally observed
as weak may be turned into extremely strong effects after they are
better understood. Consider, for example, what was known about
harnessing the weak, erratic trickles of electricity 150 years ago,
and compare that to the trillion-watt networks that run today's
power-hungry world.
PREJUDICE
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge; it
is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so
positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by
science. Charles Darwin, Introduction, The Descent of Man (1871).
Prejudice holding an opinion without knowledge or examination
of the facts is deeply embedded within human nature. It is much
easier to follow the natural impulse to form a quick judgment and
stick with it, rather than take the time and trouble to study the
actual evidence. Prejudice continues to haunt psi researchers.
Sometimes it is acknowledged as such, and sometimes it is not.
Philip Anderson, a prominent theoretical physicist at Princeton
University, assumed that psi was incompatible with physics, and so
in an 1990 editorial in Physics Today, he wrote,
If such results are correct, we might as well turn the National
Institute of Standards and Technology into a casino and our physics
classes into seances, and give back all those Nobel Prizes
. It
is for this kind of reason that physicists, quite properly, do not
take such experiments seriously until they can be (1) reproduced (2)
by independent, skeptical researchers (3) under maximum security
conditions and (4) with totally incontrovertible statistics. Oddly
enough, the parapsychologists who claim positive results invariably
reject these conditions.
It is clear that Anderson was simply ignorant of the evidence, and
yet he still felt quite confident about his opinion. We can only
imagine what Anderson thinks of well-regarded physicists who do take
such experiments seriously.
Some critics have acknowledged that they simply do not wish to
believe the evidence. For example, in 1951, the psychologist Donald
O. Hebb wrote: "Why do we not accept ESP as a psychological fact?
Rhine has offered us enough evidence to have convinced us on almost
any other issue..... I cannot see what other basis my colleagues
have for rejecting it..... My own rejection of [Rhine's] views is
in a literal sense prejudice."
In 1955, psychologist G. R. Price suggested that because psi was
clearly impossible, fraud was the best, and really the only
remaining explanation for psi effects. In a lead article in the
important journal, Science, Price began sensibly:
Believers in psychic phenomena ... appear to have won a decisive
victory and virtually silenced opposition.... This victory is the
result of an impressive amount of careful experimentation and
intelligent argumentation.... Against all this evidence, almost the
only defense remaining to the skeptical scientist is ignorance,
ignorance concerning the work itself and concerning its
implications. The typical scientist contents himself with
retaining ... some criticism that at most applies to a small
fraction of the published studies. But these findings (which
challenge our very concepts of space and time) are - if valid - of
enormous importance ... so they ought not to be ignored.
Price then flatly asserted that because ESP was "incompatible with
current scientific theory," it was more reasonable to believe that
parapsychologists cheated than that ESP might be real. Price based
his argument on a famous essay on the nature of miracles by
philosopher David Hume. Hume argued that since we know that people
sometimes lie, but we have no independent evidence of miracles, then
it is more reasonable to believe that claims of miracles are based
on lies than that miracles actually occurred. Based on this
reasoning, Price concluded,
My opinion concerning the findings of the parapsychologists is that
many of them are dependent on clerical and statistical errors and
unintentional use of sensory clues, and that all extrachance results
not so explicable are dependent on deliberate fraud or mildly
abnormal mental conditions.
Another critic of the same era was skeptical British psychologist
Mark Hansel, from the University of Wales. Like Price, Hansel wrote,
If the result could have been through a trick, the experiment must
be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP, whether or not it is
finally decided that such a trick was, in fact, used (p. 21).
[Therefore,] it is wise to adopt initially the assumption that ESP
is impossible, since there is a great weight of knowledge supporting
this point of view.
Such opinions that existing scientific knowledge is complete
and that psi necessarily conflicts with it has motivated
skeptics to imagine all sorts of good reasons to make the psi "go
away." A prime example of the power of this motivation is
illustrated by a 1987 report on parapsychology issued by the
National Research Council.
NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL REPORT
In the mid-1980s, the U. S. Army recruitment slogan was "Be all that
you can be." The slogan reflected the Army's desire to train
soldiers to achieve enhanced performance. These highly trained
warriors would be fearless and cunning, fight without fatigue, and
employ a variety of enhanced, exotic, or possibly even psychic
skills.
In 1984, the U. S. Army Research Institute asked the premier
scientific body in the United States, the National Academy of
Sciences, to evaluate a variety of training techniques and claims
about enhanced human performance. These techniques included sleep
learning, accelerated learning, biofeedback, neurolinguistic
programming, and parapsychology. The National Academy of Sciences
responded to the Army's request by directing its principal
operating agency, the National Research Council (NRC), to form a
committee to examine the scientific evidence in these areas. Because
the NRC is often asked to investigate leading-edge and controversial
topics, it maintains an explicit policy of assembling balanced
scientific committees. In fact, the policy requires members of its
committees to affirm that they have no conflicts of interest either
for or against the objects of study. This helps ensure that the
scientific reviews are fair.
On December 3, 1987, the NRC convened a well-attended press
conference in Washington, DC, to announce its conclusions. John A.
Swets, Chairman of the NRC Committee, said, "Perhaps our strongest
conclusions are in the area of parapsychology." The bottom
line: "The Committee finds no scientific justification from research
conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of
parapsychological phenomena."
Whoops. Where did this come from? To help understand the disparity
between the actual data and the NRC's conclusion, the Board of
Directors of the Parapsychological Association (PA) selected three
senior members of the PA to study the report in detail and respond
to it. The three members were John Palmer, a psychologist at the
Rhine Research Center, Durham, North Carolina, Charles Honorton, who
at the time was Director of the Psychophysical Research Laboratories
in Princeton, New Jersey, and Jessica Utts, professor of statistics
at the University of California, Davis.
After some study, the PA committee issued its report, with three
main findings. First, the two principal evaluators of psi research
for the NRC Committee, psychologists Ray Hyman and James Alcock,
both had long histories of skeptical publications accusing
parapsychology of not even being a legitimate science. In contrast,
there were no active psi researchers on the Committee. This violated
the NRC's policy of assigning members to committees "with regard
to appropriate balance."
Second, the NRC's report avoided mentioning studies favorable to
psi research but quoted liberally from two background papers that
supported the Committee's position. As if this were not enough,
the Chairman of the NRC Committee phoned one of the authors of a
third commissioned background paper, Robert Rosenthal from Harvard
University, and asked him to withdraw his conclusions because they
were favorable to parapsychology.
And third, the NRC report was self-contradictory. The Committee
widely advertised its conclusion that there was no evidence for psi
phenomena, yet the report itself admits that the Committee members
could offer no plausible alternatives to the research it surveyed.
The Committee failed to mention in the press conference that they
recommended that the Army continue to monitor psi research in the
United States and the former Soviet Union. They even recommended
that the Army propose specific experiments to be conducted. The
contrast between the NRC's advertised position and their actual
position suggests that there were conflicts between reporting a fair
evaluation of the data and what was politically expedient to report.
This was clearly revealed later when a newspaper reporter for The
Chronicle of Higher Education asked the NRC Committee Chairman, John
Swets, why he asked Rosenthal to withdraw his favorable conclusions.
Swets replied: "We thought the quality of our analysis was better,
and we didn't see much point in putting out mixed signals". Swets
explained, "I didn't feel we were obliged to represent every
point of view." This meant the NRC Committee in effect had created
a "filedrawer" of ignored positive studies that they didn't wish
to talk about. Apparently, the only acceptable views about psi for
this committee were negative ones. Given the true nature of the
evidence, this was bound to lead to some major contradictions.
And it did. The NRC Committee commissioned ten background papers by
experts in a variety of fields. One of these papers, by Dale Griffin
of Stanford University, explained how difficult it is to objectively
evaluate evidence when one is already publicly committed to a
particular belief. According to Griffin,
Probably the most powerful force motivating our desire to protect
our beliefs from others' attacks, from our own questioning,
and from the challenge of new evidence is commitment .... This
drive to avoid dissonance is especially strong when the belief has
led to public commitment.
The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal (CSICOP) is an organization well-known for its
impassioned commitment against parapsychology. Ray Hyman was one of
the original "Fellows" of CSICOP, and he was an active member of its
Executive Council at the same time he was evaluating psi research
for the NRC. So the source of many contradictions in the NRC report
is clear: Hyman's publicly committed position as a psychic
debunker.
For example, at the NRC press conference, Hyman confirmed his public
stance by announcing that the "poor quality of psi research was
`a surprise to us all we believed the work would be of much
higher quality than it turned out to be.' " Yet, in contrast to
this public statement, the report itself actually says, "
the
best
research [in parapsychology] is of higher quality than many critics
assume
."
Furthermore, in contrast to the NRC's public assertions about
"poor quality research," and "no scientific justification," was the
actual paper commissioned by the NRC to review psi experiments and
other studies of performance-enhancing techniques. Authored by
psychologists Monica Harris and Robert Rosenthal of Harvard
University, the report concluded that,
The situation for the ganzfeld domain seems reasonably clear. We
feel it would be implausible to entertain the null [hypothesis]
given the combined [probability] from these 28 studies.... When the
accuracy rate expected under the null [hypothesis] is 1/4, we
estimate the obtained accuracy rate to be about 1/3.
In non-technical language, Harris and Rosenthal concluded that there
was persuasive evidence for something very interesting going on in
the ganzfeld experiments because they found an average hit rate of
about 33% rather than the 25% expected by chance (as we discussed in
Chapter 6). They also compared the quality of the ganzfeld
experiments to experiments in four other, non-parapsychological
research areas and concluded that "only the ganzfeld ESP studies
regularly meet the basic requirements of sound experimental design."
Without belaboring the point, it is clear that abject prejudice
exists in science as it does in all human endeavors. It was detected
fairly easily in the case of the NRC Report by comparing the public
pronouncements with what the report actually says. Sometimes it is
not so easy to detect, because we usually do not stop to think that
some skeptical criticisms are simply invalid.
-- Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com > Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com > Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html > Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program ------------ Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Jun 01 2003 - 15:18:38 MDT