When sceptics fight back by Arran Frood (BBC)
Conspiracy theorists have used the internet to co-ordinate increasingly slick attacks on the accepted versions of events, but now a group of scientists and sceptics has decided it’s time to organise and fight back.
There are three issues.
First, just because someone’s view is outside of the mainstream it doesn’t mean that therefore it’s false. There are many alternative views even within science, and many accepted theories were dismissed when initially presented. Besides, not all scientific theories have been absolutely proven, and many things that were once thought to be true are later disproven.
As for the government, politicians and other officials are known to lie all of the time. The military can keep largescale activities secret for years and even decades. You have to be absolutely naive to believe everything the government tells you.
The ability to question and doubt conventional opinion is a part of critical thinking skills. Instead of telling people what to think, teach them how to think.
Second, it’s true that there is a loony fringe of alternative thinkers. On the other hand, there is a loony fringe of debunkers. As far as skeptics go, Randi isn’t the most respectable. Many people have been highly skeptical of Randi’s million dollar challenge. True skepticism cuts both ways. Skepticism as ideology is dangerous to freedom of thought.
If you want to understand the complexity of skepticism and alternative views in science, then you’d have to do some reading. I’d suggest two books: George P. Hansen’s The Trickster and the Paranormal, and Chris Carter’s Parapsychology and the Skeptics. Or if you’d rather read something shorter, there are many articles to be found online such as those on Hansen’s website.
Third, I think it’s unhelpful to try to force the world into polarized categories. Reality isn’t either/or. Any group that takes an ideology to an extreme will feel alone and isolated. This is as true for sceptical extremists as it is for religious extremists. Generally speaking, extremism isn’t an admirable trait when it comes to critical thinking skills. Polls show that the numbers of people identifying as atheist or agnostic are growing. When asked what religion people identify with, there is an increasing number of people who choose ‘none’. At the same time, the majority of people have had some kind of spiritual or paranormal experience (or some experience they don’t think can be fully explained by conventional scientific theories).
In conclusion, skepticism is helpful and a worthy attitude. But it needs to be kept in balance with other factors. Obviously, skepticism without open-minded curiosity is rather bland and I would add blind as well. The ability to imagine new possibilities and to temporarily suspend disbelief are extremely important. Anyways, if you’re going to be a skeptic, then go all the way. A skeptic who doesn’t turn their skeptical gaze back upon themselves is a narrowminded fool. Always question your self first (Mathew 7:5 – “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”).
I’m not worried about this simplistic polarized thinking. It’s no different than the theist vs atheist debate. The agnostic sits on the sidelines and laughs at both of them. As for the defenders of science, I could care less about those who feel haughty in their self-righteousness. The Forteans, Zetetics, and Pyrrhonian skeptics will keep the pseudo-skepticism in check.
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I’ve written about this subject a number of times. The following are two posts from my Gaia.com blog.
More About the Paranormal
Hansen speaks to these issues. Objectivity, verifiability, and repeatability aren’t easily applied to the paranormal, but researchers have attempted to do so. Some are satisfied with the evidence and some aren’t. […] How are lived experiences proven? Well, very little of even our “normal” subjective experience is provable. As for the paranormal, it all depends on what kind of evidence you consider acceptable.
People have seen lights and when they investigated discovered crop circles. Crop circles are just more complex forms of fairly circles that have been observed for centuries in corollation with fairy lights. My brother visited with friends a place where orbs (ie fairy lights) were known to be common. They saw the orbs and the orbs approached the car and hovered around it. Even scientists have observed orbs, but no one agrees on what explains them.
Pilots have seen ufos and they were observed simultaneously on radar. There are a fair number of radar cases. Why is there not more evidence? For one, I’ve heard that pilots are discouraged from reporting ufos. Also, some evidence gets destroyed because people fear ridicule. Vallee started out as an astronomer but later became a ufo researcher because he personally observed astronomers he worked with destroying video evidence (here is an interview with him where he speaks about this).
Rupert Sheldrake was describing a dialogue he had with Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Sheldrake: “This depends on what you regard as extraordinary”, I replied. “Most people say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?”
(Sheldrake describes how he tried to bring up his own rearch about telepathy, but Dawkins refused to discuss it.)
And something I wrote in a comment to that post:
I like the idea of piling up the anomalies. That is my basic viewpoint. Parapsychology hasn’t “proven” anything, but it has provided some anomalies. Eventually, if enough anomalies pile up, it will create a critical mass forcing a paradigm shift. As I see it, parapsychology research is still in its infancy despite it being more than a century old.
About the Newtonian paradigm of mainstream science, I think that is very true. The Newtonian paradigm has practical usefulness for research in most fields. Since there isn’t much connection between most fields and post-Newtonian paradigms, my guess is that most research scientists don’t consider theoretical complexities of quantum physics. Even paranormal research have mostly ignored theoretical issues and I doubt that many paranormal researchers are educated in quantum physics. All of science has a whole lot of catching up to do.
I suspect that if convincing evidence of the paranormal is ever found, it will probably be in the field of physics. Basically, mainstream scientists will only be convinced by evidence by mainstream science, and yet parapsychology isn’t considered mainstream and so its evidence isn’t acceptable.
I was thinking about Dawkins telling Radin that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Radin pointed out that it depends on what one considers extraordinary, but there is a further problem with Dawkin’s statement. Parapsychology gets very little funding and so is unable to do the largescale research that is necessary to produce “extraordinary” evidence, but its mainstream scientists such as Dawkins who argue that parapsychology doesn’t deserve funding because it doesn’t produce “extraordinary” evidence. So, Dawkins’ statement is disingenuous because he really doesn’t want parapsychology to produce extraordinary evidence.
It reminds me of CSICOP, the skeptical organization by various mainstream scientists (incuding Dawkins). The problem with CSICOP is that it isn’t headed by scientists and the scientists who support it have no professional experience with parapsychology research. CSICOP has no peer-reviewed journal and doesn’t support research even in disproving the paranormal. Hansen says that CSICOP did do some research early on, but it ended up proving what they were trying to disprove and so they never did research again. Worse still, they use their influence (via mainstream scientists) to keep parapsychologists from getting funding.
I am curious about the possible connection between parapsychology and quantum physics. Lynne McTaggart speaks about the connection in her books, but as she isn’t a scientist I don’t know how biased her presentation might be.
I’ve heard that there is nothing paranormal because its a false label. If the paranormal exists, then its normal. I agree with that as far as that goes… I really don’t care what one calls it. Anyways, normality is kind of a relative concept. I’m sure quantum physics seemed a bit paranormal to Newtonian scientists.
ENACTIVISM, INTEGRAL THEORY, AND 21st CENTURY SPIRITUALITY
Enactivism questions the traditional assumptions of science and so blurs the boundaries somewhat. Varela was influenced by phenomenology, and Hansen says that ethnomethodology was similarly influenced. Ethnomethodology (along with sociology of scientific knowledge and studies of experiment expectancy effects) puts the scientific endeavor into a very different context.
p. 280: “Ethnomethodologists took as their subject matter the interactions of everyday social life and how people make sense of them. That sounds innocuous enough, but ethnomethodologists probed foundations. They recognized that for orderly common activity, people must share a large body of assumptions, meanings, and expectations, though these are not consciously recognized. In order to make them explicit (i.e., bring them to conscious awareness), breaching experiments were invented, and those involved violating, in some way, typical patterns of behavior.” … “These breaching experiments have commonalities with anti-structure and the trickster; they all violate boundaries that frame experience.”
p. 281: “Ethnomethodologists pointed out that one is part of that which one observes, i.e., one participates in processes of observation. The issue of participation has some intriguing connections. At least since Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think (1910) it has been associated with the non-rational.”
p.282: “Mehan and Wood say that their theoretical perspective “within ethnomethodology commits me to the study of concrete scenes and to the recognition that I am always a part of those scenes. Social science is committed to avoiding both of those involvements.” They are correct, but few social scientists wish to acknowledge the consequences. The abstraction and distancing found in all science endow a certain status and privilege from which to judge and comment on others. In order to maintain that position, scientists must not get too “dirty,” too closely associated with their objects of study. Ethnomethodologists understand they necessarily participate in the phenomena they observe. Mehan and Wood comment that “Ethnomethodology can be seen as an activity of destratification.” This destratification is a leveling of status, and that is also associated with limimal conditions (a.k.a., anti-structure). Thus social leveling via participation and reflexivity has been recognized by theorists from entirely separate disciplines, demonstrating its validity.”
The last part about the leveling of status directly relates to the Trickster archetype, and status relates to hierarchy. Scientists often are seen as final arbiters in many matters, and traditionally science saw itself opposed to nature, above the object it studied.
Also check out this other blog post of mine as an example of a topic that exists at the edge of mainstream science:
For more information, see these Wikpidea articles about various issues involving science, knowledge, biases, and critical thinking skills:
- Brights movement
- False dilemma
- Faith and rationality
- Religiosity and intelligence
- Relationship between religion and science
- Continuity thesis
- Conflict thesis
- God of the gaps
- Unobservable entities
- Ineffable
- Parapsychology
- Observer’s Paradox
- Observer-expectancy effect
- Subject-expectancy effect
- Novelty effect
- Hawthorne effect
- Demand effect
- Pygmalion effect
- Placebo
- Placebo in history
- Placebo-controlled studies
- Nocebo
- Expectation (epistemic)
- Methods of obtaining knowledge
- Empirical knowledge
- Truth theory
- Not even wrong
- Closed circle
- Fallibilism
- Underdetermination
- Epistemic theories of truth
- Semantic theory of truth
- Redundancy theory of truth
- Deflationary theory of truth
- Consensus theory of truth
- Argumentum ad populum
- Common sense
- Conventional wisdom
- Truthiness
- Folk psychology
- Folk physics
- Counterintuitive
- Paradox
- List of paradoxes
- Philosophy of perception
- Selective perception
- Psychology of reasoning
- Cognitive distortions
- Biases
- Cultural bias
- Notational bias
- List of cognitive biases
- List of common misconceptions
- List of fallacies
- List of memory biases
- Straight and Crooked Thinking
- Hallucinations in the sane
- Self-deception
- Self propaganda
- Cognitive dissonance
- Confabulation
- Distancing language
- Philosophy of language
- Cognitive linguistics
- Neurolinguistics
- Psycholinguistics
- Natural Semantic Metalanguage
- Universalism and relativism of color terminology
- Distinguishing blue from green in language
- Sociology of language
- Ethnolinguistics
- Sociolinguistics
- Speech community
- Anthropological linguistics
- Linguistic anthropology
- Language ideologies
- Linguistic relativity
- Linguistic Determinism
- Knowledge ecology
- Map-territory relation
- Fallacy of misplaced concreteness
- Pavlovian conditioning
- Social conditioning
- Attitude polarization
- Escalating commitment
- False consensus effect
- Pluralistic ignorance
- Overconfidence effect
- True-believer syndrome
- Belief bias
- Semmelweis reflex
- Expectancy effect
- Experimenter’s regress
- Forer effect
- Subjective validation
- Confirmation bias
- Wishful thinking
- Self-fulfilling prophecy
- Selective perception
- Memetics
- Meme
- Werther effect
- Reality tunnel
- World view
- Umwelt
- Lifeworld
- Consensus reality
- Collective belief
- Belief-system
- Dominant ideology
- Communal reinforcement
- Bandwagon effect
- Conformism
- Indoctrination
- Socialization
- Enculturation
- Gatekeeper (politics)
- Appeal to authority
- Propaganda
- Infoganda
- Spin
- Framing (social sciences)
- Managing the news
- Information subsidy
- Media manipulation
- Information warfare
- Media bias
- Misinformation
- Disinformation
- Justified true belief
- Gettier problem
- Groupthink
- Spiral of silence
- Taboo
- Censorship
- Political censorship
- Corporate censorship
- Memory hole
- Chilling Effect
- Self-censorship
- Epistemology
- Meta-epistemology
- Constructivist epistemology
- Internalism and externalism
- A priori and a posteriori (philosophy)
- Analytic/synthetic distinction
- Theory of justification
- Certainty
- Uncertainty
- Degrees of truth
- Critical rationalism
- Gödel’s incompleteness theorem
- Agrippa’s Trilemma
- Philosophical skepticism
- Skeptical hypotheses
- Pseudoskepticism
- Scientific skepticism
- Objectivity (science)
- Merton Thesis
- Subject-object problem
- Embodied philosophy
- Enactivism
- Cartesian anxiety
- Rationalization (sociology)
- Iron cage
- Rational-legal authority
- Iron law of institutions
- Iron law of oligarchy
- Pragmatism
- Pragmaticism
- Pragmatic theory of truth
- Pragmatic maxim
- Neopragmatism
- Instrumentalism
- Correspondence theory of truth
- Naive realism
- Scientific realism
- Scientific materialism
- Hard science
- Positivism
- Two Dogmas of Empiricism
- Quasi-empirical methods
- Scientism
- Scientific imperialism
- Monopolies of knowledge
- Big Science
- Small Science
- Science policy
- Funding of science
- Military funding of science
- Military science
- Military-industrial complex
- Politicization of science
- List of books about the politics of science
- Scientific mythology
- Scientific community
- Institutional memory
- Scientific consensus
- Intersubjective verifiability
- Scientific method
- Scientific control
- Double-blind
- Confound
- Procedural confound
- Operational confound
- Confounding variables
- Systematic review
- Meta-analytic thinking
- Meta-analysis
- Combinatorial meta-analysis
- Study heterogeneity
- Sampling bias
- Spectrum bias
- Publication bias
- Simpson’s Paradox
- Rind et al. controversy
- Source criticism
- Models of scientific inquiry
- Rhetoric of science
- Methodological naturalism
- Research ethics
- Sham peer review
- Fabrication (science)
- Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science
- The Great Betrayal: Fraud In Science
- Pathological science
- Pseudoscience
- List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
- Bad science
- Junk science
- Popular science
- Cargo-cult science
- Voodoo science
- Parsimony
- Ockham’s razor
- Problem of the criterion
- Problem of induction
- Regress argument
- Theory of justification
- Foundationalism
- Self-justifying
- Self-evident
- Argument from ignorance
- Coherentism
- Demarcation problem
- Boundary-work
- Science Wars
- Sokal affair
- Beyond the Hoax
- Fashionable Nonsense
- The Two Cultures
- Consilience
- Pluralist theory of truth
- Interdisciplinary
- Holism in science
- Systems thinking
- Scientific reductionism
- Antireductionism
- Theory of everything
- Integral movement
- Greedy reductionism
- Duhem-Quine thesis
- Fictionalism
- Confirmation holism
- Epistemological anarchism
- Strong programme
- Sociology of knowledge
- Sociology of scientific knowledge
- Scientific Community Metaphor
- Science studies
- Science and Technology Studies
- Theories and sociology of the history of science
- Indeterminacy problem
- History and philosophy of science
- Incommensurability
- Phenomenology (science)
- Philosophy of physics
- Theophysics
- Theory of everything (physics)
- Interpretation of quantum mechanics
- Correspondence principle
- Quantum Darwinism
- Quantum Zeno effect
- Quantum mind
- Quantum mind/body problem
- Quantum pseudo-telepathy
- Quantum mysticism
- Nonlocality
- Action at a distance
- Quantum teleportation
- Quantum entanglement
- Quantum indeterminacy
- Philosophy of biology
- Philosophy of mathematics
- Quasi-empiricism in mathematics
- Cognitive science of mathematics
- Philosophy of chemistry
- Philosophy of social science
- Philosophy of psychology
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- Paradigms
- Paradigm shift
- Conceptual framework
- Theory-ladenness
- Historiography of science
- Mapping controversies
- Ethnomethodology
Apparently, there is yet another glitch in WordPress. The subjects listed at the end of the blog are all supposed to be hyperlinked, but for no apparent reason WordPress randomly broke the link on some of them. I’m surprised for such a major company how shitty the WordPress platform is. You’d think that it would be their show piece and that they would work tireleslly to get all the glitches out.
I’ll have to try to fix this fuck-up that WordPress did. It might take me a while to get to it. All of the links at the bottom of the blog were Wikipedia articles. If you want to find the correct article, just do a search for the subject on Wikipedia and it will come up.