Parapsychology History and Defense
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modified from introduction here: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Parapsychology/Sources/Steigmann
The topic of parapsychology has been heavily disputed for over 2 centuries. Of course high standards of proof and skepticism are virtues. But the reaction from antagonists has been deeply biased, and reflective of a lack of objectivity.
Thus I have created a research project in an attempt to address this, from the perspective of an advocate. I will conduct a bit of primary source and archival research, and more importantly convey the results of consultation of several thousand dollars worth of literature on the subject, in addition to highlighting relevant documents on this sources page.
I personally feel that this is an extremely interesting endeavor that is an academic underdog due to malice. As I will show, we can go back in history to see that the first Commission on Mesmerism which "debunked" it made distortions in their assessment. We can look at the relevant work of the naturalist and parapsychologist Alfred Russel Wallace which noted the omissions and distortions of his opponents like WB Carpenter, a member of the scientific establishment and a leading debunker of mesmerism and spiritualism of the time period. We can look at the relevant work of the psychologist Walter Franklin Prince, ho noted the distortions of the critics of his day in The Enchanted Boundary: Being a Survey of Negative Reactions to Claims of Psychic Phenomena, 1820-1930, which concerned the misrepresentations by critics of the work of psychical researchers pertaining to telepathy and ghosts (it is noteworthy that Frank Podmore, a chief historian of the arch-skeptics, who Prince considered reliable, made distortions as noted by the psychologist and friend of William James, James Hyslop, and others).
As regards a major document by the National Research Council which fuels contemporary scientific rejection of the field, the statistician Jessica Utts, the parapsychologist Charles Honorton, and the psychologist John Palmer noted in their Reply to the National Research Council Study on Parapsychology, and Lt. Col. John Alexander noted in Enhancing human Performance: A Challenge to the Report, the extreme a priori bias of those who were responsible for the negative conclusions of the committee, Ray Hyman and James Alcock. Jessica Utts in Replication and Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology noted the suppression by the NRC of dissenting conclusions, Hyman attempted to refute this, and Utts maintained her position against Hyman. The Office of Technology Assessment Report on Parapsychology contradicted the negative NRC conclusions, but this has been overlooked.
Earlier criticisms likewise reflect major distortions - Irvin L. Child, a Yale Psychologist, noted in his article Psychology and anomalous observations: The question of ESP in dreams. (American Psychologist, Vol 40(11), Nov 1985, 1219-1230.), noted how the critics of the Maimoinides dream telepathy experiments, James Alcock, Zusne and Jones, and CEM Hansel (all of whom are still regarded as authoritative antagonists of the subject), created false accounts of the experiments to make it look as if fraud or error could have explained the results, ignored positive replications, etc. None of these authors ever refuted Child, and CEM Hansel continued his egregious distortions. Hansel had claimed that the agent had communicated with the experimenter during the dream telepathy experiments, but this was false. During the experiment the agent did not at any time communicate with the experimenter and this was reported in the original monograph. The psychologist and conductor of the experiments, Stanley Krippner, in "New Frontiers of Human Science: A Festschrift for K. Ramakrishna Rao", p. 135, stated, "This behavior does not represent the collegiality that marks mature and considerate scientists. Even though Hansel's error had been pointed out by Akers, Child, and others, it was repeated in a 1985 paper."
Some of this can be found through deep research, but would not be known if one only consulted popular sources like Wikipedia, where we have attacks on psychical researchers without giving voice to their side of the story. Those attacked include everybody from Dean Radin (in spite of the support given him by the Nobel laureate Brian Josephson) to people in the 1800s like FWH Myers (in spite of their importance in early psychology, which can be well documented). I decided to, on the behalf of living and deceased researchers and due to the importance of the subject if not obfuscated, take upon the task of accumulating information giving their side of the story since the beginnings of research in this field.
The reason these people are attacked is because they allegedly are doing "pseudoscience", though even antagonists to the subject matter have noted that that descriptor is inaccurate, as shown in the article concerning the Dispute over the Scientific Status of parapsychology, the nucleus of an article that incorporates all important perspectives that is to be expanded.
The end result of the antagonism, if left unchallenged, is a narrative that reflects a hegemony of materialist monism that lies at the basis of the modern academic culture. Wikipedia currently is a forceful representative of this perspective, therefore I will critique material appearing on their articles as a means making a case.
The actual evidence, as assessed by leading intellectuals of various time periods, does not warrant such marginaliation. The master philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in the mid-1800s, stated that "Whoever at present doubts the facts of animal magnetism and its clairvoyance should be called not a sceptic but an ignoramus." (Arthur Schopenhauer, E. F. J. Payne. Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Volume 1. Clarendon Press, 1974. p. 229)
Writing over a century later, the master psychologist Hans J. Eysenck remarked that "Unless there is a gigantic conspiracy involving some thirty University departments all over the world, and several hundred highly respected scientists in various fields, many of them originally hostile to the claims of the psychical researchers, the only conclusion the unbiased observer can come to must be that there does exist a small number of people who obtain knowledge existing either in other people's minds, or in the outer world, by means as yet unknown to science." (Hans Jürgen Eysenck. Sense and nonsense in psychology. Penguin Books, 1957. pp. 131-132)
I intend to provide the reader with a sampling of the kind of evidence that likely convinced such men. I will note though that because the field is more marginalized now than it was even early on, and because a minority forgo other academic opportunities to pursue work in it, many current professionals focus only on research and ignore public controversy, and thus acquaintnce with the positive material, past the obfuscations, requires a certain degree of effort. There is also, conversely, a tendency among some advocates of the paranormal to ignore the sometimes powerful arguments against various claims, which critics do make in spite of their shotgun approach. So I will acknowledge that when it arises. This will be a candid appraisal, and, after exhausting avenues of research, if I find one area I cannot vindicate, I will admit this. I will moreover admit fraud when I come across it, but only after exhausting all avenues of possible refutation of allegations in this area.
What I will do is not so much look at the history of paranormal claims, which goes back to ancient times, but look at the history of psychical research from the work of people like Joseph Glanvill who critics don't really mention much because they were not being proponents in the age of serious controversy on the subject, to modern day parapsychologists, through the era when antagonism heated up. The argument I intend to make is that while there was reason for skepticism, the history of full-scale antagonism to the subject more often than not involves omissions and distortions.
The current offering is incomplete, as this is a project I intend to have completed by December 31, 2016. If a person wishes to dispute the content of this page with critical material, this site allows for him to create a separate list of sources, or page where he can do that. Alternatively, a person can dispute this material at the talk page for my user page. However, I do attempt to feature all the material I can that is notable as antagonistic to the subject, and by the end of the project will have attempted to refute some of strongest antagonistic books and articles I have come across. I will base every criticism I write on independently verifiable facts.
This resource will rely on mainstream sources showing that support for this that is overlooked does exist in such sources, and also make use of high quality fringe material, highlighting the neglected offerings of fringe proponents to our understandings in this, and how incorporation of those offerings into the standard corpus of knowledge is justified and enhances our understanding.
The topic of parapsychology has been heavily disputed for over 2 centuries. Of course high standards of proof and skepticism are virtues. But the reaction from antagonists has been deeply biased, and reflective of a lack of objectivity.
Thus I have created a research project in an attempt to address this, from the perspective of an advocate. I will conduct a bit of primary source and archival research, and more importantly convey the results of consultation of several thousand dollars worth of literature on the subject, in addition to highlighting relevant documents on this sources page.
I personally feel that this is an extremely interesting endeavor that is an academic underdog due to malice. As I will show, we can go back in history to see that the first Commission on Mesmerism which "debunked" it made distortions in their assessment. We can look at the relevant work of the naturalist and parapsychologist Alfred Russel Wallace which noted the omissions and distortions of his opponents like WB Carpenter, a member of the scientific establishment and a leading debunker of mesmerism and spiritualism of the time period. We can look at the relevant work of the psychologist Walter Franklin Prince, ho noted the distortions of the critics of his day in The Enchanted Boundary: Being a Survey of Negative Reactions to Claims of Psychic Phenomena, 1820-1930, which concerned the misrepresentations by critics of the work of psychical researchers pertaining to telepathy and ghosts (it is noteworthy that Frank Podmore, a chief historian of the arch-skeptics, who Prince considered reliable, made distortions as noted by the psychologist and friend of William James, James Hyslop, and others).
As regards a major document by the National Research Council which fuels contemporary scientific rejection of the field, the statistician Jessica Utts, the parapsychologist Charles Honorton, and the psychologist John Palmer noted in their Reply to the National Research Council Study on Parapsychology, and Lt. Col. John Alexander noted in Enhancing human Performance: A Challenge to the Report, the extreme a priori bias of those who were responsible for the negative conclusions of the committee, Ray Hyman and James Alcock. Jessica Utts in Replication and Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology noted the suppression by the NRC of dissenting conclusions, Hyman attempted to refute this, and Utts maintained her position against Hyman. The Office of Technology Assessment Report on Parapsychology contradicted the negative NRC conclusions, but this has been overlooked.
Earlier criticisms likewise reflect major distortions - Irvin L. Child, a Yale Psychologist, noted in his article Psychology and anomalous observations: The question of ESP in dreams. (American Psychologist, Vol 40(11), Nov 1985, 1219-1230.), noted how the critics of the Maimoinides dream telepathy experiments, James Alcock, Zusne and Jones, and CEM Hansel (all of whom are still regarded as authoritative antagonists of the subject), created false accounts of the experiments to make it look as if fraud or error could have explained the results, ignored positive replications, etc. None of these authors ever refuted Child, and CEM Hansel continued his egregious distortions. Hansel had claimed that the agent had communicated with the experimenter during the dream telepathy experiments, but this was false. During the experiment the agent did not at any time communicate with the experimenter and this was reported in the original monograph. The psychologist and conductor of the experiments, Stanley Krippner, in "New Frontiers of Human Science: A Festschrift for K. Ramakrishna Rao", p. 135, stated, "This behavior does not represent the collegiality that marks mature and considerate scientists. Even though Hansel's error had been pointed out by Akers, Child, and others, it was repeated in a 1985 paper."
Some of this can be found through deep research, but would not be known if one only consulted popular sources like Wikipedia, where we have attacks on psychical researchers without giving voice to their side of the story. Those attacked include everybody from Dean Radin (in spite of the support given him by the Nobel laureate Brian Josephson) to people in the 1800s like FWH Myers (in spite of their importance in early psychology, which can be well documented). I decided to, on the behalf of living and deceased researchers and due to the importance of the subject if not obfuscated, take upon the task of accumulating information giving their side of the story since the beginnings of research in this field.
The reason these people are attacked is because they allegedly are doing "pseudoscience", though even antagonists to the subject matter have noted that that descriptor is inaccurate, as shown in the article concerning the Dispute over the Scientific Status of parapsychology, the nucleus of an article that incorporates all important perspectives that is to be expanded.
The end result of the antagonism, if left unchallenged, is a narrative that reflects a hegemony of materialist monism that lies at the basis of the modern academic culture. Wikipedia currently is a forceful representative of this perspective, therefore I will critique material appearing on their articles as a means making a case.
The actual evidence, as assessed by leading intellectuals of various time periods, does not warrant such marginaliation. The master philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in the mid-1800s, stated that "Whoever at present doubts the facts of animal magnetism and its clairvoyance should be called not a sceptic but an ignoramus." (Arthur Schopenhauer, E. F. J. Payne. Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Volume 1. Clarendon Press, 1974. p. 229)
Writing over a century later, the master psychologist Hans J. Eysenck remarked that "Unless there is a gigantic conspiracy involving some thirty University departments all over the world, and several hundred highly respected scientists in various fields, many of them originally hostile to the claims of the psychical researchers, the only conclusion the unbiased observer can come to must be that there does exist a small number of people who obtain knowledge existing either in other people's minds, or in the outer world, by means as yet unknown to science." (Hans Jürgen Eysenck. Sense and nonsense in psychology. Penguin Books, 1957. pp. 131-132)
I intend to provide the reader with a sampling of the kind of evidence that likely convinced such men. I will note though that because the field is more marginalized now than it was even early on, and because a minority forgo other academic opportunities to pursue work in it, many current professionals focus only on research and ignore public controversy, and thus acquaintnce with the positive material, past the obfuscations, requires a certain degree of effort. There is also, conversely, a tendency among some advocates of the paranormal to ignore the sometimes powerful arguments against various claims, which critics do make in spite of their shotgun approach. So I will acknowledge that when it arises. This will be a candid appraisal, and, after exhausting avenues of research, if I find one area I cannot vindicate, I will admit this. I will moreover admit fraud when I come across it, but only after exhausting all avenues of possible refutation of allegations in this area.
What I will do is not so much look at the history of paranormal claims, which goes back to ancient times, but look at the history of psychical research from the work of people like Joseph Glanvill who critics don't really mention much because they were not being proponents in the age of serious controversy on the subject, to modern day parapsychologists, through the era when antagonism heated up. The argument I intend to make is that while there was reason for skepticism, the history of full-scale antagonism to the subject more often than not involves omissions and distortions.
The current offering is incomplete, as this is a project I intend to have completed by December 31, 2016. If a person wishes to dispute the content of this page with critical material, this site allows for him to create a separate list of sources, or page where he can do that. Alternatively, a person can dispute this material at the talk page for my user page. However, I do attempt to feature all the material I can that is notable as antagonistic to the subject, and by the end of the project will have attempted to refute some of strongest antagonistic books and articles I have come across. I will base every criticism I write on independently verifiable facts.
This resource will rely on mainstream sources showing that support for this that is overlooked does exist in such sources, and also make use of high quality fringe material, highlighting the neglected offerings of fringe proponents to our understandings in this, and how incorporation of those offerings into the standard corpus of knowledge is justified and enhances our understanding.
Organiser
Benjamin Steigmann
Organiser
El Sobrante, CA
