Frank Trocco- How to believe in weird things

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Public Understanding of Science

DOI: 10.1088/0963-6625/7/2/006 1998; 7; 187 Public Understanding of Science

Frank Trocco How to believe in weird things

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Public Understand. Sci.7 (1998) 187–193. Printed in the UK PII: S0963-6625(98)92654-6

ESSAY REVIEW

How to believe in weird things

Frank Trocco

“This isn’t science! It’s more like Black Magic.”

Colin Clive objects to Ernest Thesiger’s contribution to creating life, which consists of sixminiature people living in jars. (The Bride of Frankenstein, Universal Studios, 1935)

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Timeby 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 withthe chores and preparations wherever I could. One day, as we were getting ready for aProtection ritual, I spent all afternoon with an apprentice gathering the necessary herbs.

By the time we finished I was thoroughly exhausted, as we had wandered up and downgullies and ridges for hours searching out the elusive plants. Finally, we began to followa sandy stream bed back to the pickup truck. My arms were laden with the results of ourefforts. As we walked we talked about plants, and I asked my companion if there wereNavajos who specialized in gathering herbs. “Yes,” he said. “Most of them are very old, butif 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 allolder people, and suggested that they should pass down their knowledge before they passedon themselves. My friend stopped and stood still in the wash, obviously puzzled by mystatement. This was my first time on the reservation and I was extremely nervous abouttransgressing taboos, or acting like a clueless White person. I wondered what I could havesaid that was so disturbing. He thought about it for a long moment and replied, “Well,you’d have to be the right kind of person.”

What he was telling me was that there are two kinds of knowledge. There is everydaycommon knowledge, and there is sacred knowledge. Information in this second categoryis not told to just anyone. These old herbalists would sooner take their years, perhapsgenerations, of study and experimentation with them to their graves than share sacredknowledge with someone who was not prepared to receive it.

The Navajos find it relatively easy to deal with the demarcation problem, the defining ofclear epistemic boundaries. It is an issue that has perplexed Western erudition since beforethe Israelites thought they had solved it by making their God completely separate from themand from nature, as compared to the multiplicity of deities who were elaborately embeddedin the pagan world. Over a millennia later, after much dissension within the Christian

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188 F. Trocco

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) betweenthe Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit canonically clear (if still a bit muddy to the commonfolk, a theme that reappears throughout the history of demarcation controversies). As theNavajos had found, creating a distinction between exoteric and esoteric truth, the everydaypublic teaching of the church and its deeper mysterious meanings, was an ecclesiasticalnecessity.1

This was only the beginning. The demarcation problem would have to be solved againand again, although its focus shifted throughout history and cultures.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the problem was with demons. Werewerewolves people who actually changed shape (as local folk believed), or were they demonswho put on the shape of a wolf (as theologians believed)? The aspects that distinguisheda demon from a human led to profound questions of delineation: “Along what point onthe 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 theboundaries around science have been a focal point. As ethnographers attempted to makecross-cultural distinctions between magic, science, and religion, the controversy provedas 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 theearly part of the discussion Bronislaw Malinowski’s estimation of indigenous peoples was(and remains) radical:

“If by science be understood a body of rules and conceptions, based on experienceand derived from it by logical inference, embodied in material achievements and ina fixed form of tradition and carried on by some form of social organization,” theneven the lowest savage has science however rudimentary.3

The Euroamerican experience with other cultures eventually led to a deep respect fortheir beliefs. An attractive thesis that evolved from this position, and seemed to solve thedemarcation problem, was cultural relativism. Although a fully relativistic stance is logicallyimpossible, there is support throughout the social sciences, backed by seemingly mysticaldiscoveries in physics and mathematics, that our image of the world is not reliable. Whenexamining cultural epistemologies, indigenous or scientific, many scholars are sympatheticto a version of magic realism that could be paraphrased, after Feyerabend, as “ ‘Almost’anything goes.” Although not acceptable to everyone, this claim obviates the boundaryproblem. If there are only social and contextual distinctions between the real and theunreal, or the natural and the supernatural, these distinctions are interesting, but obligate usto interdisciplinary inclusiveness.

Although the demarcation problem is an issue in many disciplines, its present focus isthe challenging puzzle of what science is, and what it is not. This may seem like an obviousquestion, but it is complicated with a complete lack of consensus. In a 1983 paper ThomasGieryn concluded that “The boundaries of science are ambiguous, flexible, historicallychanging, contextually variable, internally inconsistent, and sometimes disputed.”4 This isoften quoted to demonstrate that science itself is fundamentally mysterious. By 1995, hisdefinition of science had become more enigmatic:

Nothing but aspace, one that acquires its authority precisely from and throughepisodic negotiations of its flexible and contextually contingent borders andterritories. Science is a kind of spatial “marker” for cognitive authority, empty



How to believe in weird things 189

until its insides get filled and its borders drawn amidst context-bound negotiationsover who and what is “scientific.”5

Larry Laudan had earlier come to an operational solution for this ambiguous situation:“Our [scientific] aim should be. . . to distinguish reliable and well-tested claims toknowledge from bogus ones.”6 While this sounds reasonable, in practice “bogus” claims toknowledge become any area of research that orthodox science (which we can’t delineate),defines as bogus. This reminds us of the church when it declares, “The church reserves theright to say what is of God and what is not.”7

In a Louisiana courtroom in 1985, it looked like the demarcation problem was finallyresolved. Creation science was on trial and the judge ruled “. . . that creation-science is notscience, as the scientific enterprise is usually defined: “science is what is ‘accepted by thescientific community’ and is ‘what scientists do.’ ”8

This was not the final adjudication for two reasons: (1) A legal judgment will only standuntil the next trial, and, in fact, this one went to the Supreme Court (where it was nearlyoverturned); and, (2) curiously, many reputable scientists do “do” research in areas that areconsidered over the edges of orthodox study, but their work is ignored as unscientific.9

In the popular press the demarcation problem has been taken up by a group of self-proclaimed skeptics who attempt to clarify for the public the distinction between scienceand not-science (a.k.a., pseudoscience). Through surveys of unconventional claims and areview of the scientific method,10 and anthologies of papers trying to distinguish sciencefrom pseudoscience,11 these authors simplify critical thinking and a skeptical approach sothat nonscientists will be able to make judgments with the same confidence the skepticshave developed: “In these pages you will discover that logic and rationality are powerfulforces that cannot be contradicted by the great volume of pseudoscientific and near-religiousclaptrap that the public has mistaken for fact.”12

At issue is the popular understanding of science. These scholars are claiming that thedistance 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 pseudoscientific andnonscientific beliefs abound? Religions, myths, superstitions, mysticisms, cults,New Age ideas, and nonsense of all sorts have penetrated every nook and crannyof both popular and high culture.13

In examining the history of the demarcation problem we consistently uncoverdiscontinuity between the intellectual conceptions of scholars and the opinions of themajority of people.14 Do certain ideas continue in popular understanding because thepublic does not have the requisite training to comprehend the finer points of theoreticalarguments, or because there is some truth value in these beliefs? There is some researchthat 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 availableto scientific scrutiny?

The evaluation of what science is, and what it is not, seemingly a simple question opento unexceptional analytical inquisition, is as profound as any ontological mystery.

Science and not-science

George Sanford, a reporter for theWeekly World News, was thought dead after covering astory about a secret US military base, but he finally turned up in the Nevada desert. Hisharrowing story was reported by the paper:



190 F. Trocco

“There were dozens of technicians bustling around an enormous tunnel-like cylinderlined with what appeared to be riveted, interlocking, corrugated panels. . . ,” herecalled.

“I hurriedly began taking photos with a miniature spy camera secreted in mybelt buckle.”

As the journalist captured the action on film, the panels started moving, thetunnel began to spin rapidly and a blue glow started to form at the center: “Then Iwatched in amazement as a man dressed in what looked like some kind of specialsuit, entered the tunnel, walked right into the glow—and vanished into thin air.”

Based on Sanford’s photos, a top expert has positively identified 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 ofWhy People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience,Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, would be amused (or troubled) by thisarticle, and especially by Dr. Mel Woodhim. He would encourage the reader to ask criticalquestions: Is time travel possible? What does Woodhim’s peer-reviewed research include?Is Woodhim, in fact, a real person?

Is this article rubbish, or is it possible that it reports reliable information? Overten 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 confident on this account: “Weird things are like pornography—difficult to define butobvious when you see them.”17

. . .popular ideas of our time that have little or no scientific support includedowsing, the Bermuda Triangle, poltergeists, biorhythms, creationism, levitation,psychokinesis, astrology, ghosts, psychic detectives, UFOs, remote viewing, Kirlianauras, 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 usefulto nonscience-oriented undergraduate students,Why People Believe Weird Thingsjoins thediscussion over the demarcation between science and not-science, attempting to explicatethis distinction for the nonscientist. Shermer is on a mission most succinctly stated byStephen Jay Gould in the introduction:

For, unless we rigorously use human reason both to discover and acknowledgenature’s factuality, and to follow the logical implications for efficacious humanaction that such knowledge entails, we will lose out to the frightening forces ofirrationality, romanticism, uncompromising “true” belief, and the apparent resultinginevitability of mob action.19

In his plan to avoid the above Shermer is courageous. He is willing to put his skepticismon 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 mediumo]ne woman glared at me and told me that it was ‘inappropriate’ to destroy these people’shopes during their time of grief.”20 And some colleagues question whether it is appropriateto engage pseudoscientists and thereby give credence to their ideas. However, Shermer’scommitment to the cause is clearly motivated: “If we can offer a natural explanation forapparently supernatural phenomena and make three or four simple points about science and




critical thinking so that listeners can learnhow to think instead ofwhat to think, then Ibelieve it is well worth the effort.”21

Some skeptics are so mistrustful that they believe that all of physical reality is anillusion. The rest of us may think that we inhabit a tangible world, but it is only somehilarious cosmic hallucination. Can skepticism get out of hand? Shermer thinks it can, andthe excellent section on the Holocaust deniers is his example. The deniers are a group ofresearchers who do not believe that it was Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews, that thegas chambers were used for genocidal murder, or that the numbers of Jews killed was inthe millions. Shermer works hard to confront these benighted folks because “. . . Holocaustdenial 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 ashe would any other scholarly disquisition. By comparing their research with rigoroushistoriography, he expertly demonstrates how the deniers are led by their politics ratherthan by historical reality. He also shows that debunking has definite limits, and therebydemonstrates that skepticism is an inherently reasonable pursuit.

Shermer’s intelligent book takes us on a wild ride through chapters on near-deathexperiences, 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 “twenty-five fallacies that lead us to believe weird things.” By the time the reader works theirway through appreciating that “Anecdotes Do Not Make Science” or “Unexplained Is NotInexplicable,” and hones their critical thinking by recognizing the limits of orthodox science,learning to clarify generalizations, eliminating circular reasoning, and better understandingrestrictive thinking patterns, they emerge with Shermer’s model for teasing out sophisticateddistinctions between science fact and science fiction.

This methodology is necessary because: “As a culture we seem to have troubledistinguishing science from pseudoscience, history from pseudohistory, and sense fromnonsense.”23 At least, most people do. The majority of scientists have no trouble makingthese distinctions.24 The general public doesn’t seem to get the point that “As difficult asit is for economists and meteorologists to predict the future, they are still better at it thantealeaf readers and sheep’s liver diviners.”25

It’s a miracle!

A central skeptical maxim is David Hume’s argument about miracles: “That no testimonyis sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehoodwould be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.”26

If it is more difficult 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 evolvedinto the challenge, repeated throughout the skeptical literature, that “extraordinary claimsdemand extraordinary evidence.”27

A counterclaim that Shermer doesn’t address is that thereis extraordinary evidenceaccumulating for certain unconventional ideas. It is certainly a greater miracle not tobelieve that something is happening in remote viewing and psychokinesis research (twoareas on Shermer’s list of the weird) when considerable, albeit inexplicable, evidence isavailable.28 Perhaps Shermer allows some room for eventually including these ideas inscience when he says: “Skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not gointo an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that aclaim might be true.”29

These are encouraging words. But as I scan the skeptical literature, as well as Shermer’s



192 F. Trocco

book, I don’t find “openness” extending much beyond the boundaries of orthodox scientificbeliefs.

There is a basic difference between Western scientific epistemology and all other secularworldviews. The Western analytic approach claims that the reality content of other beliefsystems can be critiqued and evaluated from within its model. As Laura Nader recentlystated: “. . . science is not only a means of categorizing the world, but of categorizing scienceitself in relation to other knowledge systems that are excluded.”30

Western science claims to be able to judge how closely other worldviews accuratelydescribe the empirical world of everyday reality, and how close their versions of the worldare to the truth. The knowledge of other cultures is evaluated against the criteria of asingle belief system. This hegemonic confidence has led to ever-increasing trust in theWestern view of reality: “The birth of Western science as a powerful, systematic, and ever-expanding set of interlinked disciplines very nearly coincides with the birth of its prestigeas a uniquely reliable and accurate way of describing the phenomenal world.”31 Today, thepseudoscientists 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 indirectlyaffirmed the existence of God, the accusations against pseudoscience reinforce our trust incontemporary orthodoxy.

Sacred knowledge

Many individuals move through the world with an “as if” attitude about the far-from-cleardistinctions surrounding science; that is, as if there is a firm and comfortable distinctionbetween science and pseudoscience. Ultimately we depend on the adjudication of experts forclarity. I am glad that Michael Shermer is out there, questioning, challenging, and makingthis a more sensible world. Holocaust deniers, charlatans, and medical quacks should beconfronted. His analysis and critique is potent, time travel is probably impossible, and Dr.Woodhim’s Ph.D. is undoubtedly mythical, but I wish Shermer was not quite so sure ofhimself.

Just as with Navajos and their aged herbalists, even when scholars are willing to provideyou with the tools to help think out problems from a particular frame of reference, theymay not be able to offer you the solution to ultimate epistemological questions. To be ableto discover those answers, “You’d 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), 110–14.2 S. Clark, “The Scientific Status of Demonology,” inOccult and Scientific 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 Review48 (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.




6 L. Laudan, “A Problem-Solving Approach to Scientific Progress,”Scientific Revolutions, ed. I. Hacking(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 153.

7 Bishop J. C. Reiss, “in a written statement that declares Joseph Januszkiewicz’s visions of the Virgin Maryare not a ‘true miracle.’ ” “Perspectives,”Newsweek(20 September 1993).

8 M. Shermer,Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of OurTime (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1997), 161.

9 D. J. Bem and C. Honorton, “Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of InformationTransfer,”Psychological Bulletin115 (January 1994) no. 1: 4–27; D. I. Radin and R. Nelson, “Evidence forConsciousness-Related Anomalies in Random Physical Systems,”Foundations of Physics19 (1989) no. 12:1499–1514.

10 For example, T. Gilovich,How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life(NewYork: 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(PrometheusBooks, 1982); C. Sagan,The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark(New York: RandomHouse, 1996); T. Schick, Jr. and L. Vaughn,How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a NewAge (California: Mayfield 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 Scientific Models: Conflicting Beliefs of Scientists

and Nonscientist Administrators in the Creation of a Secret Nuclear Surveillance System,” inNaked 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 MACHINE—NOT UFOs!”Weekly World News(13January 1998), 8–9.

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,” Skeptic3, no 2 (1995): 30–33.28 Bem and Honorton, “Does psi exist?”; D. I. Radin,The Conscious Universe: The Scientific 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,” inNaked 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 inVermont. He can be reached at RFD#2, Box 801, Montville, ME 04941, USA, e-mail:[email protected].



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Frank Trocco- How to believe in weird things