Controversy and the problems of parapsychology

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 2002 by Nancy L. Zingrone

To put it more simply, sometimes the shape of the natural world and the social--psychological--political surround of the scientist combine in equal measure to determine what is taken as a scientific fact. Sometimes when method, theory, and knowledge are more developed, the contour of the natural world is more obvious, and something akin to "pure" knowledge determines the production and application of new facts. However, sometimes when method, theory, and knowledge are not so developed, or when the social-personal--political surround is overwhelming, the contour of the natural world becomes lost and extrascientific, nonepistemic factors determine the production of knowledge. The skeptical community has often said that the overwhelming of nature by nonepistemic variables is what always happens in scientific parapsychology; that no matter how sophisticated our methodology or argumentation becomes, our will to believe always distorts our scientific practice. We believe, however, that the topography of our "error" -and thus of our "truth"--is much more complex than that.

Essentially then, what the social constructivist is trying to say is that, at different levels of what is already known, epistemic and nonepistemic factors vary as determinants in the production of what is coming to be known.

The Misconstrual of the Constructivist Approach. This seems like a conservative point to me: that we see with our own eyes, think with our contextualized and socialized brains, and moderate our talk according to the company we keep. But for some scientists, the mere suggestion that they might actually behave at the laboratory bench like the fallible human beings they truly are is so alarming that they misconstrue the constructivist enterprise completely; they become blind to evidence and deaf to argument. This misconstrual has happened even here, in our own community, which is, to be honest, quite amazing to me. If anyone should understand how elusive and chameleon-like the natural world can be, and how delicate method, observation, and theory are in the face of ambiguity and belief, it should be us. If anyone should understand the power of complex perception to confound the understanding of even simple raw sensation, it should be us. Yet, the blind and the deaf are among us.

My point then is this: Science studies analysts who use the constructivist approach have been unfairly accused of denying the existence of the real world, and of claiming that nature herself has no impact whatsoever on scientific knowledge or scientific progress. The classical constructivist approach seeks merely to show that scientific knowledge claims are negotiated entities that contain glimpses of nature moderated by the social, the political, and the psychological. As these glimpses of nature become more precise, clearer, more testable, and more predictable, the amount of social, political, and psychological distortion decreases. This last assertion sounds to me like an alternative way to state the old positivist saw that science is self-correcting. Social constructivist approaches underscore the point, however, that the much-relied-on self-correcting mechanism of science is infinitely more complex and infinitely more susceptible to derailment than we had previously understood it to be. This is a profoun dly important message for the working scientist, it seems to me. As Martin and Richards (1995) noted: