Skepticism
"I call them scoffers, not skeptics," says Marcello Truzzi, director of the Center of Scientific Anomalies Research at Eastern Michigan University.
Truzzi, who studies what he calls protoscience, was a founding member of the world's oldest and most respected skeptic society, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). But Truzzi says he withdrew after growing disillusioned with Our Group's research methods.
"They tend to block honest inquiry, in my opinion," he asserts. "Most of them are not agnostic toward claims of the paranormal; they are out to knock them."
Truzzi says that some of the CSICOP researchers set the bar of proof
outrageously high when it comes to the study of the paranormal. "When an
experiment of the paranormal meets their requirements, then they move the
goal posts," he says. "Then, if the experiment is reputable, they say it's a
mere anomaly." (Tanya Barrientos in
The Paranormal?
Pshaw!)
more...
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
(formerly CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, )
CSICOP and the Skeptics: An Overview
Skepticism and The Afterlife Experiments is on the agenda for Week 2.
Scientism
In his latest book, Psychoenergetic Science, physicist William Tiller complains about the narrow mindedness expressed by some scientists when it comes to solid research involving physics and consciousness:
In spite of the unwillingness to look at such data, many of the establishment scientists are willing to `spout off' with very derogatory opinions concerning such data - without ever having seriously looked at it. Such behavior is called scientism which is corruption of the science craft. [Tiller, p. 36]
Scientism is a philosophical position that exalts the methods of the natural sciences above all other modes of human inquiry. Scientism embraces only empiricism and reason to explain phenomena of any dimension, whether physical, social, cultural, or psychological. more...