Objections to ESP

In 1971, Ransom surveyed criticisms of the parapsychology research published since 1940. The foremost of these criticisms was the non-repeatability of experimental results. Both critics and supporters of psi research have long been in agreement that parapsychology experiments are not 100 percent repeatable, and this is what continues to fuel the arguments about the very existence of psi. Parapsychologists are puzzled whether non-repeatability is due to the erratic nature of psi itself or to experimental factors, such as mood, which are not yet sufficiently understood. Since there are many other phenomena in nature, particularly within the behavioral sciences, that are not 100 percent repeatable under experimental circumstances, parapsychologists are not prone to consider non-repeatability as evidence for the nonexistence of psi. Parapsychologists maintain that there is sufficient conceptual repeatability in psi experiments to provide the foundations for a viable research field (see Chapter IV).

One extension of the non-repeatability argument is that many studies with negative outcomes may not be reported. In a review of parapsychology research in Science, Wade (1973) comments, "critics charge that the published work represents an artifact, in as far as it tends to be only the successful experiments that get reported, while the presumably more numerous null results go unremarked."

This criticism has been answered by Charles T. Tart (1973) in a letter to Science: "There are hundreds of published, successful parapsychological experiments with the main analysis significant at the .05 level, and of these many have significance levels exceeding 10-6. The selective publication hypothesis then predicts that there are trillions of unsuccessful, unpublished ESP experiments, an obviously ridiculous figure, unless one credits the handful of parapsychologists in the last half century with some phenomenal work abilities, paranormal in themselves."

Perhaps the greatest problem parapsychologists have with statistical repeatability is their difficulty in predicting whether their significant data will result from above-chance scoring ("psi-hitting") or below-chance scoring ("psi-missing").

Critics argue that until there is some lawfulness, or regularity of findings in the same direction, parapsychology will not be taken seriously as a science. While this argument does highlight a weakness in current state-of-the-art parapsychology, it is in itself a weak argument since both psi-hitting and psi-missing data reject the null hypothesis.

The second major criticism Ransom noted (1971) is the possibility of fraud on the part of the subject, the experimenter, or both. This criticism does not generally maintain that fraud actually occurred in any particular experiment. Even C. E. M. Hansel (1966), the main advocate of this line of attack, states, "It cannot be stated categorically that trickery was responsible for the results of these experiments, but so long as the possibility is present, the experiments cannot be regarded as satisfying the aims of their originators or as supplying conclusive evidence for ESP."

Ransom points out that you simply cannot argue with this line of reasoning, "since the critic can always claim that everyone involved in the experiment in question was lying about any or all of the details.... Even if an experiment was repeated, it could be claimed that it is possible that all the experiments were fraudulent." This criticism could apply equally well to scientific experiments in every other field. Price (1955) argued in Science that fraud, even experimenter fraud, must be involved in parapsychology because it was easier to believe that men are liars than that "miracles" could occur. In 1972, Price retracted his accusations. The criticism of fraud is partially answered when the skeptic deigns to conduct his or her own experiments-as has happened frequently in parapsychology- which accounts for the growth of the field beyond Rhine's own laboratory.

Parapsychologists have generally guarded against the possibility of experimenter fraud by working in teams. Thus fraud could only result from collusion. That this method is effective is suggested by one instance of experimenter fraud discovered at the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man in Durham, North Carolina (Rhine 1974). More recently, painstaking investigation has uncovered evidence for fraudulent data manipulation in the telepathy experiments carried out by Dr. S. G. Soal, with the percipient Basil Shackleton, during the years 1941-1943 (Marwick 1978). Both of these cases were uncovered by parapsychologists themselves and published in the scholarly parapsychology literature.

Parapsychology experimenters today generally take stringent precautions against the possibility of subject fraud by maintaining conditions absolutely precluding the possibility of information leakage of any sort to the subject. Although on the popular media scene many magicians-such as the Amazing Randi have claimed that they can duplicate parapsychological effects using magic tricks, they have consistently been unable or unwilling to do so under controlled laboratory conditions (Eisenbud 1975).

Many critics and even parapsychologists take the position that once fraud has been seriously alleged or discovered, adequate grounds then exist for supposing that the phenomena in question have resulted from nothing but fraud. In this instance, the argument centers around the question of whether the phenomena simply deserve scientific investigation. Michael Scriven (1962), a philosopher of science, makes the following logical point about instances of fraud: "Any professional medium is under considerable pressure to produce phenomena on schedule. It is extremely unlikely that the kinds of phenomena we are concerned with here can be produced on demand, hence it is extremely likely that a medium if she did have significant ESP powers would be constantly failing unless she were to ‘help them out' somewhat on some occasions. Of course one likes to breathe a sigh of relief when one uncovers fraud in these cases, but honesty requires a perpetual willingness to return to the investigation of any possibility of genuine phenomena still exists. . . . "

The third kind of criticisms reported by Ransom (1971) are based on the a priori, or closed-minded, assumption that something must be at fault in any experiment reporting positive ESP findings. In 1937, the president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics released a statement approving the validity of the statistical analysis of ESP research (Camp 1937), which is essentially based on the same statistics used in all scientific research. One critic (Brown 1957) has gone so far as to suggest that parapsychology results "comprise the most prominent empirical reason for beginning to doubt the universal applicability of classical frequency probability." This view, however, has no following among other statisticians."

Most a priori objections to parapsychology are based on the common-sense notion that psi phenomena must contradict the established laws of physics. The issue here seems to be more a question of cultural views than physical laws, which are not assumed to be final in any case. Henry Margenau (1979), a noted Yale University physicist, writes that, "a question can be raised as to exactly what scientific laws would he violated by the occurrence of ESP. We have assumed that they are of the stature of the law of conservation of energy and momentum, the second law of thermodynamics, the principle of causality, and the exclusion principle of quantum mechanics. When we examine scientific laws of this caliber, however, we find them unrelated to the existence or non-existence of ESP."

Other a priori objections to parapsychology are based on the implicit belief that the existence of psi phenomena could essentially undermine the entire scientific effort to provide a rational description of the universe. This type of opposition to parapsychology is analogous to Einstein's opposition to quantum uncertainty, as embodied in his famous statement, "I cannot believe that God would play dice with the world." Mackenzie and Mackenzie (1979) note that psi phenomena violate the a priori grand scientific view "of the world as a self-contained mathematico-physical system, in which irreducibly mental qualities had a physically indescribable position, tolerable only if they were confined within individual organisms." Such a view was required in order to make nature intelligible. If the ultimate goal of science is to describe nature in terms of a uniform set of causal regularities that apply without exception to all objects - including the human mind - then the claims of parapsychology do indeed strike a subversive note, one that is certain to arouse the irrational indignation and contempt of many critics and debunkers.

Brown, G.S. Probability and scientific inference. New York: Longmans, Green, 1957.

Camp, B.H. (Statement in Notes section.) Journal of Parapsychology, 1937, 19, 305.

Eisenbud, Jules. On Ted Serios' alleged "confession." The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1975, 69, 94-96.

Hansel, C.E.M. ESP: A scientific evaluation. New York: Scribner's, 1966.

MacKenzie, B., and Mackenzie, L. Whence the enchanted boundary? Cultural sources of intolerance for parapsychology. Full Symposium Papers of the Parapsychological Association 22nd Annual Convention, John F. Kennedy University, Orinda, California, August 1979.

Margenau, H., and LeShan, L. Letter to Science (unpublished). Full Symposium Papers of the Parapsychological Association 22nd Annual Convention, John F. Kennedy University, Orinda, California, August 1979.

Marwick, B. The Soal-Goldney experiments with Basil Shackleton; new evidence of data manipulation. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, May 1978, 56(211), 250-277.

Price, G.R. Science and the supernatural. Science, 1955, 122, 359-367.

Price, G.R. Apology to Rhine and Soal. Science, 1972, 175, 359.

Ransom, C. Recent criticisms of parapsychology: A review. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1971, 65, 289 - 307.

Rhine, J.B. Comments: "A new case of experimenter unreliability. Journal of Parapsychology, June 1974, 38(2), 215 - 225.

Scriven, M. The frontiers of science: Psychoanalysis and parapsychology. In R.G. Colodny (Ed.), Frontiers of science and philosophy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962, 69-130.

Tart, C.T. Parapsychology. Science, 1973, 182, 222.

Wade, N. Psychical research: The incredible in search of credibility. Science, 1973, 181, 138-143.