In this post, he attempts to clarify his position on the matter. Unfortunately, this blogger interprets his efforts with a jaundiced eye. Frankly, Pigiucci seems to be too enmeshed in his present philosophy profession to objectively comment on science. Contrary to Pigluicci's comments in his second post, in this blogger's opinion, he should not have allowed such an unscientific opinion to see the light of day on his blog.
To summarize this topic, consider the following from Wikipedia:
Scientists critical of parapsychology assert that its extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence if they are to be taken seriously.[74] Many analysts of parapsychology hold that the entire body of evidence to date is of poor quality and not adequately controlled. In their view, parapsychology has not produced conclusive results. In support of this view, critics cite instances of fraud, flawed studies, and cognitive biases (such as clustering illusion, availability error, confirmation bias, illusion of control, magical thinking, and the bias blind spot)[75] as ways to explain parapsychological results.[76] Skeptics have also contended that people's desire to believe in paranormal phenomena causes them to discount strong evidence that it does not exist.[77]
The existence of parapsychological phenomena and the scientific validity of parapsychological research is disputed by independent evaluators and researchers. In 1988, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences published a report on the subject that concluded that "no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena."[78] In the same report, however, they also recommended monitoring some parapsychological research, such as psychokinesis on random number generators and ganzfeld effects, for possible future studies.[78] The studies at the PEAR lab, recommended for monitoring by the report, have since concluded. These studies likewise failed to elicit a positive response by the scientific community despite numerous trials.[38] A 2008 study tested participants repeatedly for 90 minutes in a magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) environment and showed no detectable psi effect, no baseline measure outside of the fMRI was collected for comparison.[75]
Additionally, the methods of parapsychologists are regarded by critics, including those who wrote the science standards for the California State Board of Education,[79] to be pseudoscientific.[80] Some of the more specific criticisms state that parapsychology does not have a clearly defined subject matter, an easily repeatable experiment that can demonstrate a psi effect on demand, nor an underlying theory to explain the paranormal transfer of information.[81] James E. Alcock, Professor of Psychology at York University [82][83][84][85] has asserted that few of parapsychology's experimental results have prompted interdisciplinary research with more mainstream sciences such as physics or biology, and that parapsychology remains an isolated science to such an extent that its very legitimacy is questionable,[86] and as a whole is not justified in being labeled "scientific".[87] Many in the scientific community consider parapsychology a pseudoscience as they claim it continues to explore the hypothesis that psychic abilities exist despite a century of experimental results that fail to conclusively demonstrate that hypothesis.[18] Richard Wiseman has criticized the parapsychological community for widespread errors in research methods including cherry-picking new procedures which may produce preferred results, explaining away unsuccessful attempted replications with claims of an "experimenter effect", data mining, and Retrospective data selection.[88]Also consider what the Skeptic Dictionary has to say on the subject.
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