Logical Unsanity

This essay was published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Fall 2005. Please don’t be turned off by the academic language and format… skip the abstract if you want and start on the first paragraph.

Abstract

When students in a university classroom are invited to share anomalous stories, the “skeptical” tactics used to debunk them seem reasonable at first, but eventually reveal a worldview that is cynical, arrogant, dogmatic, and unfalsifiable. Because any new evidence can, with sufficient effort, be made to fit a preexisting paradigm, belief is seen to come down to choice. Moreover, like most belief systems, the worldview of the Skeptic has an emotional component, long ago identified by Bertrand Russell and others as a meaninglessness or despair inherent in classical science. The choice of belief therefore extends beyond a mere intellectual decision, to encompass one’s identity and relationship to the world. This approach conflicts with traditional scientific objectivity, which enjoins that belief be detached from such considerations. The relationship between observation and belief is more subtle than the traditional scientific view that the latter must follow dispassionately from the former. Indeed, the “experimenter effect” in parapsychology, as well as mounting problems with objectivity in mainstream science, suggest a need to reconceive science and the Scientific Method in light of the crumbling of the assumption of objectivity upon which it is based.

For several years I have conducted a rather unusual activity in my classroom at Penn State. I ask my class—approximately 45 students representing a broad cross-section of the student body—to bring in a story that “doesn’t fit into scientific reality.” I tell them it could be anything—a ghost story, something with alternative medicine, a UFO sighting, a dream that came true, an experience with a fortune teller or ouija board. . . anything. “If you’ve never had such an experience,” I say, “ask your friends and relatives.” The justification I give them beforehand is that by considering what our culture categorizes as “unscientific”, we will shed light on what the adjective “scientific” means as well.
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