Positive Liberty

Discussion continues downblog. One of my favorite comments comes from longtime friend JeremyD, who channels David Hume:

By miraculous, I don’t mean wonderful or amazing, I mean outside the natural ordering of the physical world.

While a hidebound skeptic might see the world as beautiful place, I doubt one would see it as a miraculous place (meaning one in which miracles occur routinely, since that would not be a skeptical orientation but a mystical one).

…which I think is just about right. My own response to commenter Greg Taylor is below the fold. It doesn’t read on its own very well, but participants in the discussion may find it interesting, and if they like they can continue it here.

Taylor’s comments are in italics.

Good points made, a far better post than your original on this topic. I think it would be worthwhile though, rather than posturing, to take Michael Prescott’s critique on board. Michael is a very sensible person, who is not afraid to take bad science to task - equally, he takes bad skepticism to task, and there were some examples of that in your first post (as commenter RayG also pointed out). It would be worth learning lessons from that.

As I said previously, I thought the “normal” explanations for the other phenomena were obvious enough to anyone, and this is why I didn’t mention them in my first post. It amazes me how easily people conclude that no explanation is possible.

To take UoCP to task for publishing the book is arrogant cynicism. Braude is a well-credentialed (and quite skeptical) researcher of parapsychology and the paranormal. Being familiar with his work, your initial post to me smacked of ‘mouthing off’ about a subject you have little background in, on the basis of an excerpt from an entire book.

I don’t think that this is entirely fair. The excerpt is rather lengthy, as I am sure you know, and the book itself is episodic in structure. Braude’s book talks about many other topics in its other sections, but it appears that it does not deal with Katie very much anywhere else.

I was perhaps being a little bold, but given the uncritical response I’d seen so far, I thought someone really needed to step in. I have an enormous respect for the University of Chicago Press and for the school to which it is attached, and I was frankly concerned for its reputation.

Moreover, if it is wrong for me to doubt, based on this excerpt, then it is also wrong for the others to believe, or to conclude that something paranormal must be happening, based again only on this excerpt. It’s a little amazing to me that I should be attacked for criticizing an excerpt — by people who base their opinions of the case on that very same passage!

You say yourself that “The skeptic takes the cautious middle path…he tests…he tries to repeat stuff. He shares evidence and tries hard to record everything he can…The skeptic takes little steps, and he takes them seldom”. Your initial post was one big step into territory you are unfamiliar with, and your foot appears to have ended up (partially) in your mouth.

On those points:

a) “The true skeptic most certainly does claim to recognize nonsense — at times. At times: as when brass foil with recognizably industrial characteristics “somehow” materializes on a woman’s body.”

No, a true skeptic would - as you point out yourself - doubt the claim, but test carefully. Supposed ’skeptics’ throughout history have recognized nonsense, such as stones falling from the sky, continental drift, and hypnotism. They were not skeptics, they were cynics. It’s worth learning from lessons of history. By your own test here, your first post fails the standard of ‘true skepticism’ miserably.

If I may restate, you seem to make two claims here:

1. I didn’t test Katie carefully enough.
2. Skeptics are often wrong when they doubt.

I’ll respond to each. To the first, I noted the metallurgical report on Katie’s materialized foil, which found it to be brass foil of a very common type, easily available to anyone. This is an important test, since it rules out a large set of potential paranormal explanations: Not only is it foil that is putatively produced through an unknown mechanism, but it appears to have qualities quite similar to foil produced through known mechanisms. The foil is almost certainly not produced by any biological process, since it would almost certainly not have the structure that it has. And if the Visitors chose to produce brass foil, why should it just so happen to look exactly like our own?

Given that Katie has also failed to produce foil on video, I think it’s fair to embrace the skeptical hypothesis that she is a fraud. Others may very well believe, but they would be believing against a tremendously strong weight of evidence. That they meanwhile call me closed-minded does not change anything.

As to your second point: Yes, skeptics are sometimes wrong! You’d better believe it. Absolutely we are.

But the fact that skeptics have been wrong about other things does not mean that skeptics are wrong this thing. Nor does it mean that they are wrong as a general rule or as a matter of principle. Indeed, skeptics have been right about lots of things, and I think that on the whole they have been more right than wrong, at least on those questions for which the evidence is in.

Moreover, skeptics have done some truly great work in exposing fraud, phony science, and dangerous quackery. In this respect they have saved lives, punished criminals, and advanced the cause of science.

As to when skeptics are wrong, you mention two very salient examples: the stones falling from the sky and continental drift, both of which certainly happen. Your third example, however, is curious. Hypnotism is a real phenomenon, but its history is shrouded in quackery. (This is a subject I happen to know a bit about, since my specialty in history is the intellectual history of the French Enlightenment. Mesmer was of course active during the late eighteenth century in Paris, and many Enlightenment figures took an interest in his demonstrations.) Mesmer strikes me as fundamentally a showman who chanced upon a genuine phenomenon and who embellished it as much as he could for his stage performances. It took quite a while to sort things out afterward.

But who, exactly, separated the real from the phony? Skeptics did, because they insisted on replicable results, precisely measured data, detailed documentation of all experimental procedures, and review by the scientific community. Meanwhile, the credulous did all they could to obscure things. By forcing the proponents of hypnotism to test, systematize, document, and replicate, skeptics did the world a tremendous favor. This remains true even if the more extreme claims of some contemporary skeptics (e.g., “hypnotism is entirely a fraud”) were incorrect.

The same is true with the stones falling from the sky and continental drift, too: How exactly are we to separate true but radical new scientific theories (like plate tectonics and the notion that there are lots of little rocks in outer space) from false ones? The only way to do this is through a systematic attitude of doubt, in which ideally all new ideas are doubted. Those that survive are far more likely to be true — particularly if the doubters set up standards through which doubts may be discussed and evaluated. It’s far from a perfect system, but chucking it out the window at the first sight of something new is hardly a better one.

b) “First, I think I should point out that, contrary to Mr. Prescott, I don’t always claim to know what is or is not nonsense. I keep a studied silence, for example, about theoretical physics, a field about which I know little”.

But in this case you did not keep a studied silence, you decided to shoot your mouth off. And Michael Prescott called you on it. Perhaps worthy of ruminating on, rather than throwing diatribe the way of Michael Prescott?

I decided to post about this case since I thought that it didn’t take any particular scientific knowledge to offer a non-paranormal explanation that fit better than anything I’d seen elsewhere. I agree that my first post was superficial compared to my second, but I don’t agree that it was ill-considered, and I don’t regret either of them.

c) “I hereby apologize for failing to name Mohrhoff. He was an unknown to me before this exchange, and I did not think that his name was particularly important.

Nor is it particularly important that some individual scientists have believed in the existence of paranormal phenomena. ”

It is very important when you criticized the quoted reviewer for not understanding science, and in particular selecting a quote which mentioned quantum physics. Again, you make a good point in your second post, but your first post threw caution to the wind and you tried to criticize a highly credentialed scientist for not understanding how science works. Considering your humility about your own scientific credentials in this follow-up post, probably a decent criticism by Prescott, n’est ce pas?

Doing good science, I think, is a lot like doing “good” in the philosophical sense: You must both have a sense of what the good is and practice it. And even then, it can be very difficult to write about it and explain it.

In point of fact, I don’t know whether Mohrhoff does good science elsewhere, and I suspect that you don’t either. But let’s assume that he does.

Still, simply doing good science in one area does not mean that the person is always doing good science in all areas. Nor does it mean that we should take on faith anything that a “good” scientist says, particularly if that scientist is acting outside his field of expertise. Katie’s case involves questions of metallurgy and physiology, and the experts in those areas have already weighed in. What a quantum physicist has to offer here is quite unclear to me, except that, in the popular mind, quantum physicists are “smart” people. To accept their claims in unrelated fields is to accept an argument from authority of the very worst sort, since the individual in question isn’t necessarily an authority in the areas required.

Lastly, even good scientists can’t always offer good descriptions of how science should work — just as a morally good person may not be able to formulate “the good” in a way that could compete with Aristotle or Kant. I’m not saying that I do this particularly well, either, but at least I can often identify when someone has missed the mark, based on some of the philosophy of science that I have indeed studied at the university level. For what it’s worth, the scientists with the relevant expertise don’t see much to get excited over.

d) “Witness the increasingly unhinged commenters at Prescott’s blog”

I mean really, what is this? The last refuge of scoundrels? Give yourself an uppercut, and then debate Prescott’s points please.

I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re getting at here. Do you mean to say that Drew Hempel is not unhinged? He most certainly is, and I haven’t the slightest clue what he means to say in his long and rambling comments to Prescott’s post. This is not a strike against Prescott, to be sure, but it is a strike against the uncritical mindset that is skepticism’s opposite.

In that sense, I don’t regret this line at all. When you adopt an unskeptical attitude, your mind is open to any sort of nonsense, and Hempel is a good example. Keep at it long enough, and you’re lost in your own bizarre little world, making sense only to yourself (if that).

Personally, on first impression the gold leaf lady case strikes me as fraud - mainly on the basis of my past experience. But I certainly don’t know that for a fact. I would be interested though - as I hope any scientist would be - that if I was privy to data and circumstances that suggested otherwise, to study the phenomenon more closely. I’m not sure why you discussed ‘angels, ghosts and aliens’ as possible explanations, as Braude doesn’t. Again, perhaps it’s worth ruminating on your own posts, which have been a mix of salient points, and dogmatic, unscientific rubbish.

I mentioned angels, ghosts, and aliens as stand-ins for some generic paranormal entity or consciousness that was assisting these phenomena. Contrary to what some have suggested, I don’t have any axe to grind here against people who believe in any of these things, although I do not personally believe in them.

All I wanted to do was to point out that either a conscious paranormal entity or an unconscious paranormal process seems to be implicated here. Yet the latter seems a bad fit for paranormal events that also include peculiar knowledges (automatic writing and clairvoyance). And the former seems to have some awfully suspicious ways of going about things. Why would an entity choose Renaissance French, when it is one of the easiest “strange” languages to find samples of? Why care so much about marijuana — do the Visitors really share our national values regarding the Drug War? What’s with the brass foil, anyway? If they wanted to impress us, why not choose real gold? And so on.

But there is a larger point here — It seems that I’m the only one actually looking for explanations. Everyone else is just running around saying “Ooh look, unexplained, unexplained!” There is little doubt in my mind which one is the more epistemologically rigorous.

Trackback URI |