Response to Ray Hyman's Report 'Evaluation of the Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena.' (Response to Ray Hyman's Article in This Issue, P. 321)
1995; Rhine Research Center; Volume: 59; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0022-3387
Autores Tópico(s)Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs
ResumoRay Hyman's report of September 11, 1995, written partially in response to my report of September 1, 1995, elucidates the issues on which he and I agree and disagree. I basically concur with his assessment, but there are three issues he raises with regard to the scientific status of parapsychology to which I would like to respond. 1. Only parapsychology, among the fields of inquiry claiming scientific status, lacks a cumulative (p. 325). It is simply not true that parapsychology lacks a cumulative database. In fact, the accumulated database is truly impressive for a science that has had so few resources. Critics are fond of relating, as Hyman does in his report, that there has been than a century of parapsychological (p. 327), but psychologist Sybo Schouten (1993, p. 316) has noted that the total human and financial resources devoted to parapsychology since 1882 is at best equivalent to the expenditures devoted to fewer than two months of research in conventional psychology in the United States. On pages 4 and 5 of their September 29, 1994, SAIC final report, May, Luke and James summarize four reports that do precisely what Hyman claims is not done in parapsychology: They put forth the accumulated evidence for anomalous cognition in a variety of formats. Rather than dismissing the former experiments, parapsychologists build on them. As in any area of science, it is of course the most recent experiments that receive the most attention, but that does not mean that the field would divorce itself from past work. Quite to the contrary, past experimental results and methodological weaknesses are used to design better and more efficient experiments. As an example of the normal progress of inquiry expected in any area of science, the autoganzfeld experiments currently conducted by para-psychologists did not simply spring out of thin air. The original ganzfeld experiments followed from Honorton's observation at Maimonides Medical Center that anomalous cognition seemed to work well in dreams. He investigated ways in which a similar state could be achieved in normal waking hours and found the ganzfeld regime in another area of psychology. The automated ganzfeld followed from a critical evaluation of the earlier ganzfeld experiments and a set of conditions agreed upon by Honorton and Hyman. The current use of dynamic targets in autoganzfeld experiments follows from the observation that they were more successful than static targets in the initial experiments. The investigation of entropy at SAIC follows from this observation as well. This is just one example of how current experiments are built from past results. 2. Only parapsychology claims to be a science on the basis of phenomena (or a phenomenon) whose presence can be detected only by rejecting a null hypothesis (p. 328). Although it is true that parapsychology has not figured out all the answers, it does not differ from normal science in this regard. It is the norm of scientific progress to make observations first and then to attempt to explain them. Before quantum mechanics was developed there were a number of anomalies observed in physics that could not be explained. There are many observations in physics and in the social and medical sciences that can be observed, either statistically or deterministically, but that cannot be explained. As a more recent example, consider the impact of electromagnetic fields on health. An article in Science (vol. 269, August 18, 1995, p. 911) reported that after spending nearly a decade reviewing the literature on electromagnetic fields (EMFs), a panel of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) has produced a draft report concluding that some health effects linked to EMFs - such as cancer and immune deficiencies - appear real and warrant steps to reduce EMF exposure. …
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