Posted by pegasus on July 26, 2004, at 18:32:40
In reply to Re: scientific research, posted by fires on July 26, 2004, at 17:52:18
Whoa, I'm confused about how this reply ended up in this thread. But whatever, I'm happy to talk about this here.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but it does sound to me as though you are overgeneralizing. For example, I agree that one shouldn't take the statements of hallicinating schizophrenic at face value. Perhaps we shouldn't take anyone's comments about their personal experience at face value. But we can respectfully consider them. We can believe that there is some possibility that those experiences are true. We can evaluate other evidence (i.e., sympoms of schizophrenia) when deciding whether to allow the possibility of those experiences reflecting reality. That's all I was advocating. I'm not advocating blindly accepting things that people say.
Requiring scientific research or "proof" to support a phenomenon before we believe that it might be real seems like a very stiff criterion to me. I think if we demand that, then we'll end up not recognizing lots of things that might be really happening. Sometimes there just isn't "proof", and it's up to us to choose whether we'll acknowledge possibilities, rather than only certainties. The lack of proof doesn't prove that the phenomenon doesn't exist. If you don't want to acknowledge possibilities, that's up to you. Personally, I would find acknowledging only certainties to be very limiting, and that's how I read your Michael Shermer quote.
You said "If things don't lend themselves to "traditional scientific study" they certainly won't be any more easily studied by any other type of "science." I would strongly disagree with this statement. There are other paradigms of study. For example, case studies. The article I cited got into that a bit at the end, but not much.
Also, I would suggest that if something can't be studied, it may still be a real phenomenon, worthy of our attention. To me, "proof" is not a reasonable gold standard for what is worthy of consideration. Maybe that's where we fundamentally disagree.
pegasus
poster:pegasus
thread:368898
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040723/msgs/370877.html