Controversy and the problems of parapsychology

Once the terrain became apparent, I decided to focus on specific controversies in the dissertation and to draw on the methodologies of science studies in doing so. Hence the research that underlies the present article. That is, it became obvious early on that the history of English-language psychical research and parapsychology is the history of controversy. The topics debated, of course, have changed over time as research interests have shifted. But the predominant emotion that rises in one's throat as the bibliography scrolls by is longing for closure, for consensus.

Being in a state of continual controversy in a marginal science is a very peculiar experience, even if controversy is, in and of itself, continual and essential in science as a whole. As a working scientist in this discipline, it is obvious to me that we have made an enormous amount of scientific progress since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, particularly given the persistent lack of funding, institutional support, and personnel. There are those in the field today, however, who would chalk all that progress off to a lack of discernment, to wishful thinking, and to a continued tradition of ineffectual scientific practice. I agree with Henry Sidgwick, and with Dean Radin who quoted Sidgwick a few years back in his Presidential Address: The time when we needed to debate whether or not the phenomena we study exist is long past. There is an anomaly here. The shape of the natural world that is embodied by that anomaly is becoming clearer and clearer with every methodological refinement, every theoretical advance. The day is coming when the social, psychological, and political surround will not be able to distort the process of observation or the resulting interpretation.

On the other hand, my bibliography has also instilled in me a sense of caution. Unlike Radin, I am not going to put a number on it. There is a real possibility that a hundred years from now somebody else will be standing in my place, evoking the names of some of us here and saying, "Like so and so, I believe the time is long past ..." Closure slips in and out of our grasp. But closure also slips in and out of the grasps of more mainstream scientists than we, and the mysteries of that process energize the same science analysts who work so hard to understand the process of controversy itself. But how does closure happen?

THE CASE OF COLD FUSION

Before we look at what some psychologists of science have to say about closure, let us look at a case study of a field that has suffered what appears to be closure and is considered by Anglo-American mainstream science to be absolutely, completely, and utterly dead: cold fusion.

In the February 1999 issue of Social Studies of Science, Bart Simon (1999), a member of the sociology department of Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, published an article called "Undead Science: Making Sense of Cold Fusion After the (Arti) fact." Simon obtained his doctorate at the University of California at San Diego with a dissertation on cold fusion, the subtitle of which was "The Hauntology of the Technoscientific Afterlife." What interested Simon most was the disjuncture between what the mainstream scientific community knows about cold fusion and what the cold fusion research community knows about itself. In the United States, Simon pointed out, mainstream scientists "know" that 12 months after the March 1989 press conference in which two University of Utah chemists, Martin Fleischman and Stanley Pons, announced that they had discovered cold fusion, an interdisciplinary conference "proved" that the announced results had been spurious, an artifact of science practice that was, at least, wrong-headed , and at worst, incompetent. Once this "fact" was known, mainstream science withdrew its moral and financial support, the original claim was declared null and void, and institutional barriers against further research were erected. Science declared cold fusion "dead."