Amazon.com: Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience: 9780816033515: William F. Williams: Books (original) (raw)

In argumentation (even marital ones) the one who feels insecure will tend to attack the opponent on the basis of the other's past mistakes, ignoring any of the opponent's (however successful) attempts to correct them. So I could attack the times when this book makes little silly mistakes, or clearly and intentionally tries to hurt the feelings of those who have opinions that differ from the author's. But that'd be cheap. So let's take the case of one serious example of the author's pretending not to know that some of his objections have been addressed. Or maybe the author is unfamiliar with the material. Or maybe he's so irrevocably biased that no evidence would be good enough, so he doesn't read anything that might disturb his previous opinion. (In which case, it doesn't make much sense to pretend you can write a volume and call it an encyclopedia. It'd be better to call it something like Stuff I Like to Suppose.) The problem is that nobody who's innocent enough to accept the author's sweeping generalized denunciations is smart enough to read the book. (Not being smart probably is just as satisfying, wouldn't you guess, as deciding a case before you've studied the evidence?) Thus the bibliography for the section on parapsychology indicates a clear wish to slant the argument, since it fails entirely to cite any material from the Journal of Parapsychology or the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, even though he must know that useful data for any rational discussion would be there. (He also fails to notice that a not inconsiderable part of the literature of psychical research, by the way, was composed of cautious attempts to debunk the mountebanks of the early seance-room period. It wasn't particularly, for example, the reason that W. F. Prince went to the Boston Society for Psychic Research that he disagreed in some petty way over the "Margery" case when the ASPR appointed J. M. Bird to be his colleague. More significantly important was that Prince had seen Bird try to find out in this investigation how well he could catch a trickster when he saw one. He thought that it was a studied insult to appoint a second-rate person to work with him. No false modesty: WFP probably did know more about the techniques of mediumistic fraud than any American then living. I spent more than 20 years trying to study Prince's work, and today I just realized I've probably misunderstood or forgotten 19 of them. My life would have so much more clarity if I didn't know that I didn't know for sure.) In mentioning Radin's The Conscious Universe, which might summarize the case for recent discoveries and theories, the author dismisses the substantial work in a few lines. This indicates that he hasn't read the book thoughtfully and honestly, but has already arrived at conclusions that are different from the arguments of the book. This seems a particularly simple way to address difficult issues, and election campaigns do enough of this sort of thing to satisfy all of us. But our author has apparently intentionally made an effort to simplify all problematic issues in this area. In deciding to do so without actually confronting at least most of the questions that are complex, the author is bound to give the reader a very incomplete picture of the situation he's no doubt sincerely trying to clarify. How is this different from the guy who's sure there are vampires in the closet or monsters under the bed, and who can't be calmed by the attending nurse's efforts to comfort him? I haven't time to deal with all the distorted material in this book, but I guess I'd warn the reader that if the author's treatment of all the topics is as thoughtful and honest as his treatment of a century-and-a-half of parapsychological research, then you don't need to read this book. If the volume might appeal to you at all, you already know what you want to be true, so just go on thinking what you are currently thinking. Certainly don't read it if you have to make an address or write an essay, hoping to use the author's evidence in any kind of debate, because if you were to do so, your opponent will make you look pretty simple-minded. It's maybe better just to keep on thinking what you already think, because you probably don't want to spend the next several decades reading in your university library's periodical section just to unsettle yourself. Skepticism is such childlike, innocent fun.