What Is Swept Under the Rug?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31156/jaex.24100Keywords:
Science suppression, Occam’s razor, Occam’s broom, anomalous cognition, psi, parapsychology, science censorshipAbstract
Playing with the Occam’s razor trope, Nobel laureate Sidney Brenner coined the term Occam’s broom to describe the practice of sweeping under the rug facts that do not support the scientist’s hypothesis. This practice is taken to extremes by some critics of anomalous cognition research (psi), who engage in dismissing inconvenient research data (including sometimes their own), naturalistic observations, and eminent scientists supporting this research. They also engage in rhetoric in which they claim that psi ought not be considered unless published in mainstream journals while simultaneously blocking such publication, and fail to acknowledge methodological and statistical advances spurred by psi research.
References
Alvarado, C. (2008). Note on Charles Richet’s “La Suggestion Mentale et le Calcul des Probabilités” (1884). Journal of Scientific Exploration, 22(4), 543-548.
Ariew, R. (1977). Did Ockham use his razor? Franciscan Studies, 37, 5-17. https://doi.org/10.1353/frc.1977.0007
Baker, A. (2016, Winter). Simplicity. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/simplicity
Baptista, J., Derakhshani, M., & Tressoldi, P. E. (2015). Explicit anomalous cognition: A review of the best evidence in ganzfeld, forced choice, remote viewing and dream studies. In E. Cardeña, J. Palmer, & D. Marcusson-Clavertz (Eds.), Parapsychology: A handbook for the 21st century (pp. 192–214). McFarland.
Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407–425. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021524
Bohm, D. (1986). A new theory of mind and matter. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 80(2-3), 113–135.
Brenner, S. (1997). In theory. Current Biology, 7(3), R202. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(97)70095-2.pdf
Cardeña, E. (2015). Eminent people interested in psi. In Psi encyclopedia, https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/eminent-people-interested-psi
Cardeña, E. (2015b). The unbearable fear of psi: On scientific censorship in the 21st century. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 29(4), 601–620.
Cardeña, E. (2018). The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review. American Psychologist, 73(5), 663–677. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000236
Cardeña, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.) (2014). Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. Doi: 10.1037/14258-000
Cardeña, E., Marcusson-Clavertz, D., & Palmer, J. (2015). Reintroducing parapsychology. In E. Cardeña, J. Palmer, & D. Marcusson-Clavertz (Eds.). Parapsychology: A handbook for the 21st century (pp. 1-11). McFarland.
Cardeña, E., & Winkelman, M. (2011). Altering consciousness. Multidisciplinary perspectives. Volumes I and II. Praeger.
Carr, B. (2015). Higher dimensions of space and time and their implications for psi. In E. C. May & S. B. Marwaha (Eds.), Extrasensory perception: Support, skepticism, and science. Vol. 2: Theories of psi (pp. 21–61). Praeger.
Child, I. L. (1987). Criticism in experimental parapsychology, 1975–1985. In S. Krippner (Ed.), Advances in parapsychological research 5 (pp. 190–224). McFarland.
Costa de Beauregard, O. (1998). The paranormal is not excluded from physics. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 12(2), 315–320.
Dorfman, A. (2022). The futility of censorship. New York Review of Book, 69(6), 32-34.
Dwyer, P., & Micale, M. (2021). The darker angels of our nature: Refuting the Pinker theory of history and violence. Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350148437
Feynman, R. P. (1999). The best short works of Richard P. Feynman. The pleasure of finding things out. Penguin.
French, C. (2021, September 22). Why I now believe parapsychology is not a pseudoscience. The Skeptic. https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2021/09/why-i-now-believe-parapsychology-is-a-science-not-a-pseudoscience/
Gauld, A. (1982). Mediumship and survival: A century of investigations. Academy Chicago Publishers.
Greenwald, A. G. (1980). The totalitarian ego. Fabrication and revision of personal history. American Psychologist, 35(7), 603–618. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.35.7.603
Heller, J. (1955). Catch-22. Retrieved from http://www.pauladaunt.com/books/catch22.pdf
Hövelmann, G. H. (2015). On the usefulness of parapsychology for science at large. In E. Cardeña, J. Palmer, & D. Marcusson-Clavertz (Eds.), Parapsychology: A handbook for the 21st century (pp. 389–398). McFarland.
Kelly, E. W., & Tucker, J. B. (2015). Research methods with spontaneous case studies. In E. Cardeña, J. Palmer, & D. Marcusson-Clavertz (Eds.), Parapsychology: A handbook for the 21st century (pp. 63–76). McFarland
Kelly, E. W., & Tucker, J. B. (2015). Research methods with spontaneous case studies. In E. Cardeña, J. Palmer, & D. Marcusson-Clavertz (Eds.), Parapsychology: A handbook for the 21st century (pp. 63–76). McFarland.
Knight, S. (2019, March 4). The psychiatrist who believed people could tell the future. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/04/the-psychiatrist-who-believed-people-could-tell-the-future
Monteiro de Barros, M. C., Leão, F. C., Vallada Filho, H., Lucchetti, G., Moreira-Almeida, A., & Prieto Peres, M. F. (2002). Prevalence of spiritual and religious experiences in the general population: A Brazilian nationwide study. Transcultural Psychiatry. doi: 10.1177/13634615221088701.
Noakes, R. (2020). Physics and psychics.: The occult and the sciences in Modern Britain. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316882436
Particle Data Group (2020). Review of Particle Physics. Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics. 8, 083C01, https://doi.org/10.1093/ptep/ptaa104
Pratt, J. G., Rhine, J. B., Smith, B. M., Stuart, C. E., & Greenwood, J.A. (1940). Extra-sensory perception after sixty years: A critical appraisal of the research in extra-sensory perception. Henry Holt. https://doi.org/10.1037/13598-000
Radin, D. (2007). Finding or imagining flawed research. The Humanistic Psychologist, 35(3), 297-299. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873260701578384
Reber, A. S., & Alcock, J. E. (2019a). Searching for the impossible: Parapsychology’s elusive quest. American Psychologist, 75(3), 391-399. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000486
Reber, A. S., & Alcock, J. E. (2019b, July/August). Why parapsychological claims cannot be true. Skeptical Inquirer, 43(4). https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/07/why-parapsychologicalclaims-cannot-be-true/
Richet, C. (1884). La suggestion mentale et le calcul des probabilités [Mental suggestion and estimate of probabilities]. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étrangere, 18, 609–674.
Sheldrake, R. (2015). Psi in everyday life: Nonhuman and human. In E. Cardeña, J. Palmer, & D. Marcusson-Clavertz (Eds.), Parapsychology: A handbook for the 21st century (pp. 350–363). McFarland.
Shoup, R. (2015). Physics beyond causality: Making sense of quantum mechanics and certain experimental anomalies. In E. C. May & S. B. Marwaha (Eds.), Extrasensory perception: Support, skepticism, and science. Vol. 2: Theories of psi (pp. 63-83). Praeger.
Siegfried, T. (2021, August 28). The real meaning of pseudoscience (review of On the fringe, by Michael D. Gordin). Science News, p. 30.
Siegfried, T. (2022, January 15). Uncertainty reigns. Science News, pp. 16-22.
Stapp, H. P. (2017). Quantum theory and free will. Springer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58301-3
Wagenmakers, E.-J., Wetzels, R., Borsboom, D., & van der Maas, H. L. J. (2011). Why psychologists must change the way they analyze their data: The case of psi: Comment on Bem (2011). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 426–432. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0022790
Watt, C., & Tierney, L. (2015). Psi-related experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (2nd ed., pp. 241–272). American Psychological Assn. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14258-009
Wiseman, R., Watt, C., & Kornbrot, D. (2019). Registered reports: An early example and analysis. PeerJ, 7(4), e6232. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6232
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Etzel Cardeña
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All articles published in JAEX are open access, freely and universally accessible online, and archived in the open journal’s Lund University website (https://journals.lub.lu.se). Articles in JAEX can be distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License CCBY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, with appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, a link to the Creative Commons license, and an indication if changes were made.
