Parapsychology

Essay from: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~n51ls801/PHI340mirror/parapsych.html

Parapsychology is a relatively young branch of inquiry. It dates from the late nineteenth century with the founding of the British Society for Psychical Research, among whose members were some famous philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, including the American William James, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

The first problem we meet is a rather basic one: What is parapsychology? The term itself means only "outside of, but related to, psychology"; that can't be a good definition here, since biology would then be counted as parapsychology. To say it is the study of paranormal phenomena doesn't help much either, unless we're told what "paranormal" means. If paranormal phenomena are defined as those that do not have any discoverable natural causes or scientific explanation, then that immediately disqualifies parapsychology as nonscientific and makes further scientific investigation pointless. It'd be cheating to try to settle the debate by such stipulative definition. Often there is an anti-materialistic bias and a strong sympathy for a dualistic view of mental phenomena among parapsychologists, but this is a just a matter of personal bias and has no business being assumed as definitive of parapsychological investigation. There are other ways that one might characterize the boundaries of the concepts "parapsychology" and "paranormal," but they have their problems, too. Perhaps we need look no further. The trouble in defining parapsychology suggests an easy way to dismiss it as pseudoscience, since, as we've seen, precision in definition is a virtue:

Parapsychology is a pseudoscience because it and its fundamental concept, paranormal phenomenon, lack any clear definition; sciences always have clearly defined fundamental concepts.

Like most easy ways of dealing with something, this one is wrong. In many well-developed branches of science there is profound controversy and unclarity about fundamental concepts. I have already alluded to the dispute in biology over the concept of "living thing." The problem is not just how to classify viruses. The successes of molecular biology are remarkable, but do they support a chemical definition of life, or an information-theoretic definition that allows for artificial life? Also within biology, there is a very active debate, with a direct influence on the choice of experiments and the distribution of grant money, concerning the proper definition of the notion of species, so important to evolutionary biology. In medicine, there is no more important distinction that between being alive and being dead; the last thing you want your doctor to be fuzzy about is that distinction. But it is bedeviled by hard cases, and despite the moral urgency attached to drawing the line, no hard and fast distinction seems on the horizon. The situation is so bad that some state legislatures have stipulated a legal definition of death (typically some sort of 'brain death' criterion), but, of course, one doesn't solve such conceptual problems by legislative stipulation. In developing sciences, the fundamental concepts may be ill-defined or even unknown. It often takes a while, say, 100 years, for it to become apparent how best to organize a new field of inquiry. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when modern physics was getting its start, there was just such debate concerning force and momentum. While precision in definition is certainly highly desirable, it is often the end result of a great deal of experimental and theoretical investigation. One of the most difficult tasks in science is figuring out which concepts are needed to explain the phenomena we discover. Nevertheless, we don't allow complete chaos to reign when we grant that there is a field of inquiry developing. But parapsychology is not completely chaotic either. There are certain classes of phenomena which it seeks to study (either by proving that there are such phenomena or by proving that there are none): ESP of various sorts (clairvoyance, precognition), telekinesis, reincarnation, communication with the dead, dowsing, psychometry, and so on. Although it may be more chaotic than most familiar examples of science, it can't on that ground alone be dismissed. We must, after all, be careful not to cut off new inquiry too quickly.

In 1987, a psychologist named David Marks published a helpful review of parapsychology in one of the world's leading science journals, Nature. He makes an astonishing and potentially disturbing observation about parapsychology: that there are no theories to account for paranormal phenomena. But as we've already seen in the case of astrology, the absence of a known underlying physical mechanism is no reason to dismiss something as pseudoscience. There is, however, another criticism lurking in the neighborhood, and it may seem more promising:

Parapsychology is a pseudoscience because paranormal phenomena are known to be physically impossible.

To take a simpler case, suppose that Senator Porkbarrel proposed funding an Institute for the Advanced Study of Round Squares. He wouldn't get very far because round squares are impossible, and we can prove that. One problem with this criticism is that it isn't so clear that paranormal phenomena are physically impossible. (Remember that the belief of some parapsychologists in purely spiritual, nonphysical media is just that: their belief, not a fundamental principle of parapsychology.) There might, for example, be some hitherto unsuspected, purely physical mechanism permitting the transmission of information from one mind to another without going through the usual channels. What's often at issue in such a debate is just what is and is not physically possible, possible, that is, according to science. Suppose, however, that parapsychology established in some way, experimental, theoretical, or both, that paranormal phenomena were physically impossible. That in itself would be a scientific achievement. Impossibility arguments and proofs are quite common and valuable in all branches of science since they help to define the extant theories and to constrain the range of possibilities to investigate. Although parapsychology would thereby put itself out of business, that's nothing against it; we all hope that someday medicine will put itself out of business, too.

Perhaps there's no point in looking for such underlying mechanisms if there's no reason to believe that such extrasensory perception of one mind by another ever actually occurs. (Remember that what we're looking for here is a criterion that will allow us to send the unqualified packing, not a principle that will tell us in advance who'll win the race for truth.) If the objection is to be relevant in this case, it must be because it's based on a suspicion that the methods of parapsychology are not of the right kind to yield the relevant information about the actuality of ESP. And there is, after all, much talk among scientists and others of the scientific method. Perhaps then

Parapsychology is a pseudoscience because it does not employ The Scientific Method.

This criterion is pretty empty unless we've got some independent understanding of what the scientific method is. I'm skeptical that there is such a thing. Try this 'experiment': find basic college-level texts in each major branch of science and look through them. Do you get an impression of one method, common to all branches? On the contrary, the overwhelming impression is of enormous diversity - of methods, among other things. And this impression would only be reinforced by a wider survey of more advanced materials. There are many, many methods in science. Nevertheless, some sorts of reasoning do seem especially important throughout science. The kind of reasoning taught in statistics and lab courses about designing of experiments, estimating precision, and estimating probability and degrees of confidence are part and parcel of scientific method, as are the principles of deductive logic taught in symbolic logic courses. If parapsychology systematically ignores all of that, then it might justly be sent home before the race. And if it systematically tries to excuse every apparent failure of every relevant statistical tests, that would tend to show that it had no real interest in sticking to the standards set by statistical reasoning.

However, if anything is clear about parapsychology, it is that it strives to employ the statistical techniques common to the conduct of the rest of experimental science. Some, even many, of its practitioners make mistakes in the application of statistical techniques, but parapsychology is hardly unique in that respect: much of modern statistical theory was developed to serve as sound techniques for assessment of agricultural experiments which hadn't been so well-managed before. The author of one standard introductory text on probability theory gives examples drawn from respectable scientific journals of misapplied statistical technique. In fact, plenty of published parapsychological research exemplifies very high standards of statistical reasoning; and in those many cases where the highest standards were not observed the investigator may nevertheless have been trying hard to do well. The most famous modern parapsychologist, J. B. Rhine, who worked at Duke University for many years, often stressed the importance of proper statistical design and analysis of experiments.

To recall a previously discussed and unsuccessful criterion, parapsychology has a social role very much like that of older, more established sciences: its investigators have attained well-paid university posts, there are research institutes devoted to it, and parapsychologists publish technical articles in their own journals and in some of the best psychology journals. Even their orders for equipment are much the same as those of other lab scientists: computers, various measuring devices, special shielded chambers, and so on.

So despite its relative conceptual disarray, the doubts of some about the possibility of paranormal phenomena, and the statistical mistakes of some of its investigators, parapsychology seems especially difficult to rule out, on principled grounds, as pseudoscience.

As before, none of our discussion tends in the least to show that the provocative claims made by parapsychologists are true.A careful look at the data shows that despite many years of trying, not a single properly performed experiment has shown the existence of any paranormal phenomena.

[But see:

http://moebius.psy.ed.ac.uk/js_index.html
http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp
http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/psy1.html ]

Why, then, is belief in such phenomena so widespread, given that it is scientifically unsupported? This isn't exactly on topic, but it's such an interesting question about human irrationality that I want to say just a bit about it.

How many of you have had this experience: you pick up the phone to call your best friend (spouse, mother, etc.), and there, at the other end of the line, is your friend waiting to talk with you - the phone's not even had a chance to ring! What an amazing coincidence! Why, the only possible explanation is extrasensory contact, mind to mind, without benefit of telephone wires!

Phooey. Given how often people talk to one another on the phone and the tendency of human schedules to synchronize, this experience is not that unlikely. Amazing-seeming coincidences are often cited as evidence for various paranormal phenomena. But amazing-seeming coincidences are far more common than most of us think - that, of course, is why they seem amazing when they occur, and this fact is exploited by pretenders to psychic power. There is an interesting body of psychological research on how bad most people are at estimating probabilities, even after having received extensive training and done well on standard tests. Some researchers have even been driven to hypothesize that being bad at statistics might have evolutionary survival value. I'm not sure we need to go quite that far, but there's no denying that most of us do a poor job in this arena. To give two other simple examples: The likelihood of getting five heads for five fair coins flipped at once is about three percent; but the likelihood of the same outcome in a run of 100 flips is about ninety-six percent, far higher than most would estimate. Then there is the surprising Common Birthday phenomenon, which can be used by pretenders to psychic powers. In a randomly selected group of just 200 the likelihood that two or more people will have the same birthday is very high, about 1 - (1/10^55), which is awfully close to dead certain. Not only do our inadequacies in estimating likelihoods make us more credulous than we ought to be, they also interfere with rational assessment of risk and so make public policy-setting to deal with risks far more difficult.

We have examined three allegedly clear examples of pseudoscience. They form a sort of progression. Astrology had an effect on the development of a true science - astronomy - but its connection was not one of content: no specifically astrological principles remain part of astronomy. Phrenology had not only an important effect on the development of modern neuropsychology, but it actually contributed some content: (an early version of) a central hypothesis of modern brain science, the hypothesis of localization of brain function. Nevertheless, phrenology was very badly flawed in its methods. Parapsychology may not have an important contribution to make to the way science views the mind, but its methods are often those of true science. We may not care deeply about how any of these three are classified, as nonscience or bad science; either way, they don't win the race - although the prevalence of belief in ESP suggests that many of you do care about the fate of parapsychology. We turn next to an example that has been the focus of an intense and emotionally charged controversy, one that has already has had an effect on how children are educated, and on the larger issue of the proper role of education in our society. I refer, of course, to Scientific Creationism. Many of its opponents, some of whom have testified to their views in court, claim that it is pseudoscience - a cover for a religious and political agenda that has no place in the public schools. (Some of its opponents even contend that it doesn't belong in private schools or churches - they want it to go away altogether.) We'll next take a look at whether their charge of pseudoscience stands up under scrutiny. And we'll take a close look at how Scientific Creationism itself fares when judged by the scientific standards its proponents claim as their own.