A
Anonymous
Guest
It seems to me, from stuff on this message board and elsewhere, that there are two fairly different philosophical and methodological approaches to the subject matter that often get lumped together under the label 'Fortean'. I reckon clarifying this might reduce the amount of time that gets spent on arguments that don't get anywhere.
The approaches differ in their attitudes to data and to the scientific method. Sometimes they are embodied entirely in people; more often we combine a bit of both, so maybe you could call them different strategies for investigating unexplained phenomena that we all use to some extent. Anyway, the first approach basically accepts the validity of the scientific method, and doesn't usually seem to labour under any particularly deep doubts as to the problematic nature of knowledge itself. People who do this tend to be frustrated by more concrete things like conflicting reports, unreliable witnesses, and most of all the inherently unrepeatable nature of a lot of Fortean phenomena. But they do try to get through the evidence to the truth behind, by comparing sources, checking what was going on at the time, and all the rest. It tries to approximate the objectivity of history and, where possible, science. The method doesn't take data in the word's etymological sense - as something 'given'. Often, under this sort of analysis, data looks pretty unreliable, and so as much data as possible needs to be collected and compared. This works well for some things - it's often quite effective for UFO sightings, for instance. Or historical anomalies often end up looking pretty dismally un-anomalous if you follow them through the texts since their inception, checking how later writers just copied earlier ones and made up stuff that later got taken as gospel.
However, this approach leaves itself open to criticism for 'explaining away' phenomena, for not believing data and witnesses that the investigator decides are unreliable, for fitting recalcitrant facts into neat models, for basically subscribing to the sceptical doctrine that extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence, for buying into scientific materialism. At the same time, it doesn't really get you very far with proper scientific fundamentalists, since there aren't many experiments that are repeatable or done on a big enough scale to be statistically convincing. The method can end up looking like a kind of poor cousin of science, plagued by the same dogmatism but without any of the usefulness.
The other method is not usually sceptical of data at all. Instead it's sceptical at a much higher epistemological level - sceptical of paradigms and models used to explain data, or even, in extreme cases, of the idea of knowledge itself. For example, Fort doesn't usually check his data very much. (Yes, yes, I know he was nowhere near as unreliable as his debunkers would have you think, but I reckon everyone will admit that some of the stuff in his books is much more reliable than other stuff, while a certain amount of stuff is just stupid.) He doesn't really seem to care if the odd story is patently false; he buries you with volume of them, in order to attack the very idea of consistent explanation. This style tends to be radically hostile to science and to notions of objectivity, claiming (at its extreme) that the fact that scientists work in a social and political context means objectivity is impossible.
This approach is philosophically far more radical, and works well when you're trying to instill a sense of the wonder and strangeness of the cosmos, but often has very little to say about individual cases, except for just proposing outlandish theories that look more like an effort at annoying scientists than a serious attempt at explaining things. In itself it doesn't really help you investigate anything.
Also it can give more moderate Forteans a bad name, because as commonly formulated it's often based on some slightly dodgy science and epistemology (IMHO). If you're not careful you can end up so against any idea of explanation or accurate/useful modelling of the world, so hardline in your commitment to the utter falsity of all metaphysics (a commitment that is, itself, obviously a metaphysical one), that you have nothing to say about anything, and that instead of supporting efforts to understand the universe, you're actually hindering them with knee-jerk hostility to anything but a vague and generalized feeling that the world is very weird and unpredictable.
Just as some people are way too ready to dismiss uncomfortable data as hallucination or outright lies, others are way too ready to close down all debate with a facile 'the world is utterly inscrutable and mysterious' attitude, without properly assessing the data. And often what the person wheeling this line out really seems to mean is 'the world is utterly mysterious, and all opinions other than my own are presumptuous and contemptible. Believe what I say.' The modern priestcraft of science versus the age-old priestcraft of mystery.
Clearly this is a worst-case scenario that almost never happens in reality, and I'm not saying one of these methods is better, or that they are mutually exclusive - I'm just trying to describe what I see as the most common Fortean strategies. So does anyone else think this split between what we might call 'local sceptics' and 'epistemological sceptics' is a real thing? Or is it just the concoction of a fevered brain?
Personally I reckon that both approaches have serious flaws, and that trying to combine them, or at least link them more closely, could be beneficial to our understanding of all sorts of things. Sorry about this slightly confused and long-winded presentation, but I want to go home. One imperfect example of this, for those of you that came to the UnCon, would be Andy Roberts/Peter Brookesmith versus Colin Bennett, although personally I don't reckon the latter is a very fair representation of the type. Whaddy'allthink?
The approaches differ in their attitudes to data and to the scientific method. Sometimes they are embodied entirely in people; more often we combine a bit of both, so maybe you could call them different strategies for investigating unexplained phenomena that we all use to some extent. Anyway, the first approach basically accepts the validity of the scientific method, and doesn't usually seem to labour under any particularly deep doubts as to the problematic nature of knowledge itself. People who do this tend to be frustrated by more concrete things like conflicting reports, unreliable witnesses, and most of all the inherently unrepeatable nature of a lot of Fortean phenomena. But they do try to get through the evidence to the truth behind, by comparing sources, checking what was going on at the time, and all the rest. It tries to approximate the objectivity of history and, where possible, science. The method doesn't take data in the word's etymological sense - as something 'given'. Often, under this sort of analysis, data looks pretty unreliable, and so as much data as possible needs to be collected and compared. This works well for some things - it's often quite effective for UFO sightings, for instance. Or historical anomalies often end up looking pretty dismally un-anomalous if you follow them through the texts since their inception, checking how later writers just copied earlier ones and made up stuff that later got taken as gospel.
However, this approach leaves itself open to criticism for 'explaining away' phenomena, for not believing data and witnesses that the investigator decides are unreliable, for fitting recalcitrant facts into neat models, for basically subscribing to the sceptical doctrine that extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence, for buying into scientific materialism. At the same time, it doesn't really get you very far with proper scientific fundamentalists, since there aren't many experiments that are repeatable or done on a big enough scale to be statistically convincing. The method can end up looking like a kind of poor cousin of science, plagued by the same dogmatism but without any of the usefulness.
The other method is not usually sceptical of data at all. Instead it's sceptical at a much higher epistemological level - sceptical of paradigms and models used to explain data, or even, in extreme cases, of the idea of knowledge itself. For example, Fort doesn't usually check his data very much. (Yes, yes, I know he was nowhere near as unreliable as his debunkers would have you think, but I reckon everyone will admit that some of the stuff in his books is much more reliable than other stuff, while a certain amount of stuff is just stupid.) He doesn't really seem to care if the odd story is patently false; he buries you with volume of them, in order to attack the very idea of consistent explanation. This style tends to be radically hostile to science and to notions of objectivity, claiming (at its extreme) that the fact that scientists work in a social and political context means objectivity is impossible.
This approach is philosophically far more radical, and works well when you're trying to instill a sense of the wonder and strangeness of the cosmos, but often has very little to say about individual cases, except for just proposing outlandish theories that look more like an effort at annoying scientists than a serious attempt at explaining things. In itself it doesn't really help you investigate anything.
Also it can give more moderate Forteans a bad name, because as commonly formulated it's often based on some slightly dodgy science and epistemology (IMHO). If you're not careful you can end up so against any idea of explanation or accurate/useful modelling of the world, so hardline in your commitment to the utter falsity of all metaphysics (a commitment that is, itself, obviously a metaphysical one), that you have nothing to say about anything, and that instead of supporting efforts to understand the universe, you're actually hindering them with knee-jerk hostility to anything but a vague and generalized feeling that the world is very weird and unpredictable.
Just as some people are way too ready to dismiss uncomfortable data as hallucination or outright lies, others are way too ready to close down all debate with a facile 'the world is utterly inscrutable and mysterious' attitude, without properly assessing the data. And often what the person wheeling this line out really seems to mean is 'the world is utterly mysterious, and all opinions other than my own are presumptuous and contemptible. Believe what I say.' The modern priestcraft of science versus the age-old priestcraft of mystery.
Clearly this is a worst-case scenario that almost never happens in reality, and I'm not saying one of these methods is better, or that they are mutually exclusive - I'm just trying to describe what I see as the most common Fortean strategies. So does anyone else think this split between what we might call 'local sceptics' and 'epistemological sceptics' is a real thing? Or is it just the concoction of a fevered brain?
Personally I reckon that both approaches have serious flaws, and that trying to combine them, or at least link them more closely, could be beneficial to our understanding of all sorts of things. Sorry about this slightly confused and long-winded presentation, but I want to go home. One imperfect example of this, for those of you that came to the UnCon, would be Andy Roberts/Peter Brookesmith versus Colin Bennett, although personally I don't reckon the latter is a very fair representation of the type. Whaddy'allthink?
