One of the most frustrating aspects of the psi debate is the casual assumption by educated scientists that parapsychological claims carry no weight. Part of the issue derives from the larger problem of educated people assuming that training in their own field of expertise gives them understanding of other fields which rivals that of specialists in those fields (e.g. anthropologists who deride findings by physicists). But in the case of parapsychology, there appears to be a larger problem.
As I was investigating parapsychological research last night, I came upon a 1988 article by Hyman (Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene) and read this passage.
R. Hyman, in Experientia 44 (1988), Birkh/iuser Verlag, CH-4010 Basel/Switzerland wrote:
Today, parapsychologists (the contemporary term for psychical researchers) conduct experiments which they publish in several refereed parapsychological journals. These parapsychologists, for the most part, have been trained in one or more of the recognized natural or social scientific disciplines. The experiments feature the same types of methodological controls, sophisticated instrumentation, and statistical analyses that one finds in the more orthodox scientific disciplines.
Despite this apparent sophistication in methodology and continual publication of experimental findings purporting to confirm the existence of psi (ESP and psychokinetic phenomena), the majority of the scientific establishment still does not accept the claims. Indeed, in many ways the relationship between psychical research and the scientific establishment has remained the same from 1882 to the present. Each new generation of psychical investigators puts before the scientific community experimental results which it claims proves the existence of paranormal phenomena. And each new generation of orthodox scientists either ignores the evidence or dismisses it out of hand.
One aspect of this relatively static relationship that particularly frustrates the parapsychologists is that the members of the scientific community often judge the parapsychological claims without firsthand knowledge of the experimental evidence. Very few of the scientific critics have examined even one of the many experimental reports on psychic phenomena. Even fewer, if any, have examined the bulk of the parapsychological literature that appears regularly in The Journal of Parapsychology, The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, and The European Journal of Parapsychology. Consequently, parapsychologists have justification for their complaint that the scientific community is dismissing their
claims without a fair hearing.
What struck me was Hyman's own ignorance of "the bulk of the parapsychological literature that appears regularly" which he demonstrated further into his essay.
R. Hyman, in Experientia 44 (1988), Birkh/iuser Verlag, CH-4010 Basel/Switzerland wrote:
It is one thing to argue that a certain proportion of the experiments in a given area yields significant departures from chance. It is another, and scientifically more important, question whether the results of the different experiments yield consistent and lawful patterns. A related matter is cumulativeness. Do today's experimental findings build upon and extend the findings of the previous generations of the experimenters in the field? Parapsychology seems to be alone among the various areas of inquiry which claim scientific status in that it lacks such cumulativeness. As I have argued elsewhere, each new generation of parapsychologists discards the findings of the previous generation and essentially starts from scratch with new paradigms 5. Other important, but even vaguer, global criteria could be mentioned such as theoretical productivity and paradigmicity.
Yet it has been a longstanding finding of parapsychologists that those who believe in or expect to see psi score better on psi tests than those who reject psi phenomena, and over twenty years before Birken wrote, researchers have been returning consistent results favoring extraverts over introverts in psi studies (see for instance H. J. Eysenck, Personality and extra-sensory perception, J. of the Society for Psychical Research 44 (1967), 55--70); as a result of this research, participants have often been selected on the basis of these criteria in order to increase the likelihood of psi appearing in a parapsychological study. Whether these findings do or do not demonstrate the existence of psi, they belie the reasonable and patient tone of Hyman's remarks: parapsychology does not lack "cumulativeness." The general assumption is that parapsychologists are biased researchers who carelessly apply their own assumptions into the conclusions of their research, when if anything it is the critics who lack trustworthiness.
And this is actually a problem for parapsychology - all scientific disciplines depend on criticism and dissent to prevent dogmatism and systematic errors from taking root. Simply put, if critics and skeptics aren't doing their job of pointing out problems and making good faith suggestions on methodology, I have less reason to trust the findings of the parapsychologists themselves, who are not very well motivated to criticize their own findings.
Topic: The systematic bias against parapsychology (Read 1002 times)
July 24, 2010, 01:56:29 AM