Consensus
Then again, JS has clarified his point a little, and it does seem like a point worth making.
…the kind of naturalistic worldview that most
materialists embrace, and the scientific methodology that goes with it,
rules out of court my kind of experience as a datum to be explained.
Therefore, if my kinds of experiences do exist, and if they also have
naturalistic explanations, they’re never going to be discovered, because the
“it must be a coincidence because it could be a coincidence” response or the
“ah but the testimony is necessarily suspect” response are both
unfalsifiable.
Again, I thought that was common knowledge – but maybe I was wrong to think that. I thought it was common knowledge that the inadmissability of personal experience rules a lot of important material out of court, just as literal legal standards rule a lot of genuine evidence out of court. I thought it was common knowledge that science errs on the side of caution and that that necessarily closes off a lot of important, interesting, and perhaps valid evidence. Anyway, as JS says, it’s not something to take lightly. No, it’s not. There should be research on weird stuff like his experience. I thought there was, but I don’t know that for a fact.
Meanwhile here’s the FT making his point for him.
Peer review is a bulwark against cranks, crooks and incompetents. But too much reliance on peer review carries its own dangers. Every profession defines its own concept of excellence in inward-looking ways. Successful academics learn how to trigger the buttons that win the approval of referees…A further step down a well defined road wins easier acceptance than a deviation from the beaten track…Big advances come through the paradigm shifts and peer review makes this difficult. The line between the crank and the genius is sometimes a fine one and may only be apparent after time has elapsed.
It’s interesting that Matt Ridley said much the same thing in his contribution to the Kitzmiller article here.
There is one sentence that troubles me…: `Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community…’ My concern is…about scientific consensus. In this case I find it absolutely right that the overhwelming nature of the consensus should count against creationism. But there have been plenty of other times when I have been on the other side of the argument and seen what Madison called the despotism of the majority as a bad argument. On climate change, for example, I used to argue fervently that the early estimates of its likely extent were exaggerated, that the sceptics raising doubts should be heard and answered rather than vilified. Yet this minority was frankly `bullied’ with ad hominem arguments. Again, the reaction of many environmental scientists to Bjørn Lomborg’s splendid and thought-provoking book was to pour scorn rather than assemble counter evidence. Scientists are no better at coping with disagreement than anybody else.
So what’s the difference? I agree with the scientific consensus sometimes but not always, but I do not do so because it is is a consensus. Science does not work that way or Newton, Harvey, Darwin and Wegener would all have been voted into oblivion. Science must allow for minority views. Intelligent Design is wrong because it is dishonest, not because it is outvoted.
Consensus blocks new discovery, they both point out. Okay. We’ll try to guard against that.
Is it just me or does anyone elses head hurt every time JS says that the responses to his testimony are unfalsifiable, as if his testimony itslef is not unfalsifiable…
To be fair, I think I would concede that both JS’s hypothesis (that he read Cheryl’s mind by means not yet known to conventional science), and the counter-suggestions (that it was an unusually lucky guess, or, or …) are unfalsifiable, because this was a one-off event with no controls and no independent witnesses.
But I’m not sure I agree that “the kind of naturalistic worldview that most materialists embrace, and the scientific methodology that goes with it, rules out of court [JS’s] kind of experience as a datum to be explained” – except insofar as any one-off irreproducible datum is, by definition, not susceptible to scientific investigation.
To me, the strangest aspect of JS’s acccount was his insistence on its uniqueness. I (and plenty of other people I know) sometimes have a conviction that we know something without being able to explain why; but we’ve had this several, or lots, of times in our lives, and we’ve learnt that such convictions can be erroneous.
So if JS’s hypothesis is that he alone, or some subset of humanity, on one and only one occasion in their lives, can read the mind of one particular person, or some subset of humanity, then agreed, I do not see any way of testing that.
If the hypothesis is that many, maybe all, humans can, under conditions not yet known, read many, or maybe all, other human’s minds even if visual and auditory cues (and the possibility of trickery) are excluded, then this is susceptible to scientific investigation, and has been investigated. Some investigations have claimed results better than chance, for example in divining one of four patterns on cards – but not, as far as I know, in divining one person out of thousand(s). And many investigations have unmasked both frauds who pretended to be mind-readers, or shown that sincere would-be mind-readers were mistaken – or at least could not perform under controlled conditions.
I agree that scientists can be too quick to condemn surprising conjectures as barmy. At first, they laughed when Wegener pointed out the, possibly coincidental, way Africa and South America look as though they fit together. But they did come round when the evidence mounted up.
Ophelia
I think you should arrange for JS to have a nice lunch with James Randi as soon as possible.
Funny you should mention it, Chris – James Randi recommended B&W on his website the other week. But he’s still recuperating, I’m not sure a lunch with JS would be healthy for him just now.
Tingey, I agree with you but I think that JS’s anecdote is an example of something which gets rejected as evidence even though there is a hypothetical possibility that it should not be. That is (to quote-mine Nicholas, above), ‘one-off irreproducible [data are], by definition, not susceptible to scientific investigation’, and they thus get ruled out as evidence on practical grounds regardless of whether or not they represent real phenomena.
Suppose that JS’s experience was somer form of psychic phenomenon but that such psychic phenomena were always found in such contexts – one-off irreproducible data. The evidence would be there, but it would not be amenable to scientific investigation, and thus scientists would not look at it and would not identify the phenomenon. (No, I don’t believe that psychic phenomena exist – I’m just making a point.)
Yes – that is his point, if I understand it correctly. And if he’s right it is quite tragic. Not really surprising (we’re just little old primates, of course we can’t find out everything), but still tragic.
But I still have a very hard time seeing reasonable skepticism as complacent. But maybe that’s because I’m too complacently skeptical.
My head hurts.
I would also disagree with this thesis that “one-off” events are always outside the reach of science. It’s all a matter of sample size and appropriate controls — to pull an example from astronomy, when the microwave background was discovered, it was recognized immediately as telling us something general about the state of the Universe 13 billion years ago. And while it was soon theorized that the CMBR might not be perfectly identical in all directions, the measurement of those random variations was completely impossible with the tools of the time — not only were they nearly undetectable from the Earth’s surface, but one would have to cover the entire sky to do anything useful with the data.
Now, 40 years later, we have just that, a map of the entire sky CMBR correct to 1 part in tens of thousands, and it’s opened up whole new areas of research and knowledge that would NOT work with a smaller data set (say, an extremely detailed observation of ONE fluctuation.) Likewise, one psychic experience, no matter how well-documented, cannot tell us about the likelihood of all psychic experiences, or whether they are more likely to be genuine or coincidental.
In much the same way, perhaps, a large enough data set of people and their interactions might someday be data-mined for indications of the kinds of more-than-random occurrences that people suggest. It’s not beyond the reach of science, only beyond the current level of observations and analysis, and it’s important not to conflate today’s limitations with limitations on all future science.
(That said, I fully expect that they will find nothing, but that’s probably just my naturalistic worldview talking.)
[But I still have a very hard time seeing reasonable skepticism as complacent. But maybe that’s because I’m too complacently skeptical.]
I think that this is an irregular noun:
I am a reasonable sceptic.
You are complacent.
He or she is pig-headedly dogmatic.
Yes – the old irregular verb thought has crossed my mind more than once during this discussion.