Public Understanding of Science

http://pus.sagepub.com How to believe in weird things

Frank Trocco Public Understanding of Science 1998; 7; 187 DOI: 10.1088/0963-6625/7/2/006 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pus.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/2/187

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Public Understand. Sci. 7 (1998) 187193. Printed in the UK

PII: S0963-6625(98)92654-6

ESSAY REVIEW

How to believe in weird things

Frank Trocco

This isnt science! Its more like Black Magic. Colin Clive objects to Ernest Thesigers contribution to creating life, which consists of six miniature people living in jars. (The Bride of Frankenstein, Universal Studios, 1935)

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997), ISBN 0-7167-3090-1, 306 pages

Years ago, during a sabbatical, I lived at a trading post on a Navajo Indian reservation. While there I made friends with a Chanter and attended healing ceremonies, helping with the chores and preparations wherever I could. One day, as we were getting ready for a Protection ritual, I spent all afternoon with an apprentice gathering the necessary herbs. By the time we nished I was thoroughly exhausted, as we had wandered up and down gullies and ridges for hours searching out the elusive plants. Finally, we began to follow a sandy stream bed back to the pickup truck. My arms were laden with the results of our efforts. As we walked we talked about plants, and I asked my companion if there were Navajos who specialized in gathering herbs. Yes, he said. Most of them are very old, but if you go into their homes there are many dried plants hanging from the ceiling. I replied, with what I believed was a completely benign comment, that it was sad that they were all older people, and suggested that they should pass down their knowledge before they passed on themselves. My friend stopped and stood still in the wash, obviously puzzled by my statement. This was my rst time on the reservation and I was extremely nervous about transgressing taboos, or acting like a clueless White person. I wondered what I could have said that was so disturbing. He thought about it for a long moment and replied, Well, youd have to be the right kind of person. What he was telling me was that there are two kinds of knowledge. There is everyday common knowledge, and there is sacred knowledge. Information in this second category is not told to just anyone. These old herbalists would sooner take their years, perhaps generations, of study and experimentation with them to their graves than share sacred knowledge with someone who was not prepared to receive it. The Navajos nd it relatively easy to deal with the demarcation problem, the dening of clear epistemic boundaries. It is an issue that has perplexed Western erudition since before the Israelites thought they had solved it by making their God completely separate from them and from nature, as compared to the multiplicity of deities who were elaborately embedded in the pagan world. Over a millennia later, after much dissension within the Christian
0963-6625/98/020187 + 07$19.50 c 1998 IOP Publishing Ltd and The Science Museum

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church, a synod in Nicaea (A.D. 325), composed of church intellectuals and theologians, established the truth of the Trinity, making the boundaries (i.e., the lack of them) between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit canonically clear (if still a bit muddy to the common folk, a theme that reappears throughout the history of demarcation controversies). As the Navajos had found, creating a distinction between exoteric and esoteric truth, the everyday public teaching of the church and its deeper mysterious meanings, was an ecclesiastical necessity.1 This was only the beginning. The demarcation problem would have to be solved again and again, although its focus shifted throughout history and cultures. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the problem was with demons. Were werewolves people who actually changed shape (as local folk believed), or were they demons who put on the shape of a wolf (as theologians believed)? The aspects that distinguished a demon from a human led to profound questions of delineation: Along what point on the axis from miracles through natural wonders to ordinary natural contingencies were they [demons] to be placed?2 In the last hundred years, anthropology has taken up the debate, and it is here that the boundaries around science have been a focal point. As ethnographers attempted to make cross-cultural distinctions between magic, science, and religion, the controversy proved as contentious as the Nicaean establishment of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as One. Accepting magic, science, and religion as separate categories was a creative step, but in the early part of the discussion Bronislaw Malinowskis estimation of indigenous peoples was (and remains) radical: If by science be understood a body of rules and conceptions, based on experience and derived from it by logical inference, embodied in material achievements and in a xed form of tradition and carried on by some form of social organization, then even the lowest savage has science however rudimentary.3 The Euroamerican experience with other cultures eventually led to a deep respect for their beliefs. An attractive thesis that evolved from this position, and seemed to solve the demarcation problem, was cultural relativism. Although a fully relativistic stance is logically impossible, there is support throughout the social sciences, backed by seemingly mystical discoveries in physics and mathematics, that our image of the world is not reliable. When examining cultural epistemologies, indigenous or scientic, many scholars are sympathetic to a version of magic realism that could be paraphrased, after Feyerabend, as Almost anything goes. Although not acceptable to everyone, this claim obviates the boundary problem. If there are only social and contextual distinctions between the real and the unreal, or the natural and the supernatural, these distinctions are interesting, but obligate us to interdisciplinary inclusiveness. Although the demarcation problem is an issue in many disciplines, its present focus is the challenging puzzle of what science is, and what it is not. This may seem like an obvious question, but it is complicated with a complete lack of consensus. In a 1983 paper Thomas Gieryn concluded that The boundaries of science are ambiguous, exible, historically changing, contextually variable, internally inconsistent, and sometimes disputed.4 This is often quoted to demonstrate that science itself is fundamentally mysterious. By 1995, his denition of science had become more enigmatic: Nothing but a space, one that acquires its authority precisely from and through episodic negotiations of its exible and contextually contingent borders and territories. Science is a kind of spatial marker for cognitive authority, empty

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How to believe in weird things until its insides get lled and its borders drawn amidst context-bound negotiations over who and what is scientic.5

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Larry Laudan had earlier come to an operational solution for this ambiguous situation: Our [scientic] aim should be . . . to distinguish reliable and well-tested claims to knowledge from bogus ones.6 While this sounds reasonable, in practice bogus claims to knowledge become any area of research that orthodox science (which we cant delineate), denes as bogus. This reminds us of the church when it declares, The church reserves the right to say what is of God and what is not.7 In a Louisiana courtroom in 1985, it looked like the demarcation problem was nally resolved. Creation science was on trial and the judge ruled . . . that creation-science is not science, as the scientic enterprise is usually dened: science is what is accepted by the scientic community and is what scientists do. 8 This was not the nal adjudication for two reasons: (1) A legal judgment will only stand until the next trial, and, in fact, this one went to the Supreme Court (where it was nearly overturned); and, (2) curiously, many reputable scientists do do research in areas that are considered over the edges of orthodox study, but their work is ignored as unscientic.9 In the popular press the demarcation problem has been taken up by a group of selfproclaimed skeptics who attempt to clarify for the public the distinction between science and not-science (a.k.a., pseudoscience). Through surveys of unconventional claims and a review of the scientic method,10 and anthologies of papers trying to distinguish science from pseudoscience,11 these authors simplify critical thinking and a skeptical approach so that nonscientists will be able to make judgments with the same condence the skeptics have developed: In these pages you will discover that logic and rationality are powerful forces that cannot be contradicted by the great volume of pseudoscientic and near-religious claptrap that the public has mistaken for fact.12 At issue is the popular understanding of science. These scholars are claiming that the distance between what most people believe and what is real is vast: If we are living in the Age of Science, then why do so many pseudoscientic and nonscientic beliefs abound? Religions, myths, superstitions, mysticisms, cults, New Age ideas, and nonsense of all sorts have penetrated every nook and cranny of both popular and high culture.13 In examining the history of the demarcation problem we consistently uncover discontinuity between the intellectual conceptions of scholars and the opinions of the majority of people.14 Do certain ideas continue in popular understanding because the public does not have the requisite training to comprehend the ner points of theoretical arguments, or because there is some truth value in these beliefs? There is some research that demonstrates that the public is sometimes wiser than the scientists,15 but, beyond this, could there be a public intuition with the ability to acknowledge phenomena not available to scientic scrutiny? The evaluation of what science is, and what it is not, seemingly a simple question open to unexceptional analytical inquisition, is as profound as any ontological mystery. Science and not-science George Sanford, a reporter for the Weekly World News, was thought dead after covering a story about a secret US military base, but he nally turned up in the Nevada desert. His harrowing story was reported by the paper:

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F. Trocco There were dozens of technicians bustling around an enormous tunnel-like cylinder lined with what appeared to be riveted, interlocking, corrugated panels . . . , he recalled. I hurriedly began taking photos with a miniature spy camera secreted in my belt buckle. As the journalist captured the action on lm, the panels started moving, the tunnel began to spin rapidly and a blue glow started to form at the center: Then I watched in amazement as a man dressed in what looked like some kind of special suit, entered the tunnel, walked right into the glowand vanished into thin air. Based on Sanfords photos, a top expert has positively identied the device. There is no doubt in my mind that this apparatus is being used for time travel research, declared Dr. Mel Woodhim, a theoretical physicist in Cambridge, Mass.16

Skeptic Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, would be amused (or troubled) by this article, and especially by Dr. Mel Woodhim. He would encourage the reader to ask critical questions: Is time travel possible? What does Woodhims peer-reviewed research include? Is Woodhim, in fact, a real person? Is this article rubbish, or is it possible that it reports reliable information? Over ten million people read the supermarket tabloids. Are their claims real or imaginary? More important, how can we tell the difference? Shermer, like his skeptical colleagues, is condent on this account: Weird things are like pornographydifcult to dene but obvious when you see them.17 . . . popular ideas of our time that have little or no scientic support include dowsing, the Bermuda Triangle, poltergeists, biorhythms, creationism, levitation, psychokinesis, astrology, ghosts, psychic detectives, UFOs, remote viewing, Kirlian auras, emotions in plants, life after death, monsters, graphology, crypto-zoology, clairvoyance, mediums, pyramid power, faith healing, Big Foot, psychic prospecting, haunted houses, perpetual motion machines, antigravity locations, and, amusingly, astrological birth control.18 In the most readable addition to the skeptical literature, and therefore the most useful to nonscience-oriented undergraduate students, Why People Believe Weird Things joins the discussion over the demarcation between science and not-science, attempting to explicate this distinction for the nonscientist. Shermer is on a mission most succinctly stated by Stephen Jay Gould in the introduction: For, unless we rigorously use human reason both to discover and acknowledge natures factuality, and to follow the logical implications for efcacious human action that such knowledge entails, we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising true belief, and the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action.19 In his plan to avoid the above Shermer is courageous. He is willing to put his skepticism on the line publicly by appearing on TV and radio shows to debate creationists, mediums, and Holocaust deniers, even when he receives criticism: [After confronting a medium o]ne woman glared at me and told me that it was inappropriate to destroy these peoples hopes during their time of grief.20 And some colleagues question whether it is appropriate to engage pseudoscientists and thereby give credence to their ideas. However, Shermers commitment to the cause is clearly motivated: If we can offer a natural explanation for apparently supernatural phenomena and make three or four simple points about science and

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critical thinking so that listeners can learn how to think instead of what to think, then I believe it is well worth the effort.21 Some skeptics are so mistrustful that they believe that all of physical reality is an illusion. The rest of us may think that we inhabit a tangible world, but it is only some hilarious cosmic hallucination. Can skepticism get out of hand? Shermer thinks it can, and the excellent section on the Holocaust deniers is his example. The deniers are a group of researchers who do not believe that it was Hitlers plan to exterminate the Jews, that the gas chambers were used for genocidal murder, or that the numbers of Jews killed was in the millions. Shermer works hard to confront these benighted folks because . . . Holocaust denial is not simply going to go away and it is not benign or trivial.22 Rather than simply ignoring the deniers, Shermer treats their claims as seriously as he would any other scholarly disquisition. By comparing their research with rigorous historiography, he expertly demonstrates how the deniers are led by their politics rather than by historical reality. He also shows that debunking has denite limits, and thereby demonstrates that skepticism is an inherently reasonable pursuit. Shermers intelligent book takes us on a wild ride through chapters on near-death experiences, Edgar Cayce, alien abductions, recovered memories, cults, and creation science. In order to ferret out the weird from the real, he asks us to consider a series of twentyve fallacies that lead us to believe weird things. By the time the reader works their way through appreciating that Anecdotes Do Not Make Science or Unexplained Is Not Inexplicable, and hones their critical thinking by recognizing the limits of orthodox science, learning to clarify generalizations, eliminating circular reasoning, and better understanding restrictive thinking patterns, they emerge with Shermers model for teasing out sophisticated distinctions between science fact and science ction. This methodology is necessary because: As a culture we seem to have trouble distinguishing science from pseudoscience, history from pseudohistory, and sense from nonsense.23 At least, most people do. The majority of scientists have no trouble making these distinctions.24 The general public doesnt seem to get the point that As difcult as it is for economists and meteorologists to predict the future, they are still better at it than tealeaf readers and sheeps liver diviners.25 Its a miracle! A central skeptical maxim is David Humes argument about miracles: That no testimony is sufcient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.26 If it is more difcult to believe an unusual phenomenon (e.g., angels or perpetual motion) than not to believe it, choose the likelier (i.e., less miraculous) conclusion. This has evolved into the challenge, repeated throughout the skeptical literature, that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.27 A counterclaim that Shermer doesnt address is that there is extraordinary evidence accumulating for certain unconventional ideas. It is certainly a greater miracle not to believe that something is happening in remote viewing and psychokinesis research (two areas on Shermers list of the weird) when considerable, albeit inexplicable, evidence is available.28 Perhaps Shermer allows some room for eventually including these ideas in science when he says: Skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true.29 These are encouraging words. But as I scan the skeptical literature, as well as Shermers

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book, I dont nd openness extending much beyond the boundaries of orthodox scientic beliefs. There is a basic difference between Western scientic epistemology and all other secular worldviews. The Western analytic approach claims that the reality content of other belief systems can be critiqued and evaluated from within its model. As Laura Nader recently stated: . . . science is not only a means of categorizing the world, but of categorizing science itself in relation to other knowledge systems that are excluded.30 Western science claims to be able to judge how closely other worldviews accurately describe the empirical world of everyday reality, and how close their versions of the world are to the truth. The knowledge of other cultures is evaluated against the criteria of a single belief system. This hegemonic condence has led to ever-increasing trust in the Western view of reality: The birth of Western science as a powerful, systematic, and everexpanding set of interlinked disciplines very nearly coincides with the birth of its prestige as a uniquely reliable and accurate way of describing the phenomenal world.31 Today, the pseudoscientists are the ones who have come under the scrutiny of this analytical model. In our tightly dichotomous worldview, if the category science exists, the category of not-science is a necessity. Just as the demarcation of sixteenth-century demons indirectly afrmed the existence of God, the accusations against pseudoscience reinforce our trust in contemporary orthodoxy. Sacred knowledge Many individuals move through the world with an as if attitude about the far-from-clear distinctions surrounding science; that is, as if there is a rm and comfortable distinction between science and pseudoscience. Ultimately we depend on the adjudication of experts for clarity. I am glad that Michael Shermer is out there, questioning, challenging, and making this a more sensible world. Holocaust deniers, charlatans, and medical quacks should be confronted. His analysis and critique is potent, time travel is probably impossible, and Dr. Woodhims Ph.D. is undoubtedly mythical, but I wish Shermer was not quite so sure of himself. Just as with Navajos and their aged herbalists, even when scholars are willing to provide you with the tools to help think out problems from a particular frame of reference, they may not be able to offer you the solution to ultimate epistemological questions. To be able to discover those answers, Youd have to be the right kind of person. Acknowledgment I would like to thank John Carson for commenting on a draft of this essay. References
1 K. Armstrong, A History of God (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 11014. 2 S. Clark, The Scientic Status of Demonology, in Occult and Scientic Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. B. Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 354. 3 S. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 68. 4 T. F. Gieryn, Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists, American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 792. 5 T. F. Gieryn, Boundaries of Science, Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. S. Jasanoff, G. E. Markle, J. C. Petersen, and T. Pinch (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995), 405.

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6 L. Laudan, A Problem-Solving Approach to Scientic Progress, Scientic Revolutions, ed. I. Hacking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 153. 7 Bishop J. C. Reiss, in a written statement that declares Joseph Januszkiewiczs visions of the Virgin Mary are not a true miracle. Perspectives, Newsweek (20 September 1993). 8 M. Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1997), 161. 9 D. J. Bem and C. Honorton, Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer, Psychological Bulletin 115 (January 1994) no. 1: 427; D. I. Radin and R. Nelson, Evidence for Consciousness-Related Anomalies in Random Physical Systems, Foundations of Physics 19 (1989) no. 12: 14991514. 10 For example, T. Gilovich, How We Know What Isnt So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (New York: The Free Press, 1991); T. Hines, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988); J. Randi, Flim-Flam: The Truth about Unicorns, Parapsychology, and Other Delusions (Prometheus Books, 1982); C. Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Random House, 1996); T. Schick, Jr. and L. Vaughn, How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age (California: Mayeld Publishing Company, 1995). 11 For example: K. Frazier, ed., The Hundredth Monkey and Other Paradigms of the Paranormal (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991); M. Gardner, Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus (New York: Avon Books, 1981). 12 Randi, Flim-Flam, 3. 13 Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, 26. 14 S. J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 31. 15 D. Jacobson and C. A. Ziegler, Popular Delusions and Scientic Models: Conicting Beliefs of Scientists and Nonscientist Administrators in the Creation of a Secret Nuclear Surveillance System, in Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge, ed. L. Nader (New York: Routledge, 1996). 16 M. Foster, Secret Military Base Area 51 Houses TIME MACHINENOT UFOs! Weekly World News (13 January 1998), 89. 17 Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, 274. 18 Ibid., 27. 19 Ibid., x. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 Ibid., 136. 22 Ibid., 241. 23 Ibid., 275. 24 Ibid., 156. 25 Ibid., 40. 26 Ibid., 45. 27 T. Schick, Jr., Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence? A Reappraisal of a Classic Skeptics Axiom, Skeptic 3, no 2 (1995): 3033. 28 Bem and Honorton, Does psi exist?; D. I. Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientic Truth of Psychic Phenomena (San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997). 29 Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, 8. 30 L. Nader, Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge, in Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge, ed. L. Nader (New York: Routledge, 1996), 3. 31 P. R. Gross and N. Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), 17.

Author Frank Trocco teaches science at Lesley College in Maine and Vermont College in Vermont. He can be reached at RFD#2, Box 801, Montville, ME 04941, USA, e-mail: ftrocco@acadia.net.

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