Skepticism

In summary, a skeptic is a doubter. In terms of classical philosophy, skeptics doubt everything, sometimes including even the evidence of their own senses. Most modern skeptics are considerably less radical than that. The term skeptic today is used most often to describe people who are advocates of conventional science, and enjoy applying critical analysis to unusual claims. Especially when those scientifically unusual claims are believed by a number of people. Skeptics typically offer a contradictory opinion to published accounts that they believe are unscientific or irrational, even (perhaps especially) if those accounts are widely accepted as fact. This aspect of skepticism is what makes it such an important form of political free speech.

A favorite saying of skeptics is "extraordinary claims require (demand) extraordinary evidence." A sensible notion, meaning that if something seems unlikely, then it probably is unlikely, so we should invest some time gathering good information about it before accepting it as true. We all apply this principle to some degree. When someone claims to be able to sell you a car for $100, you immediately look for the catch. Your built-in "baloney detector" begins chiming away. Skeptics believe that we should use our "baloney detector" much more often than we do, that we should all apply certain universal principles of analysis and criticism to claims before believing them.

The professed skeptic particularly distrusts claims that violate the principles of conventional science, and especially in certain fields where they believe many people already hold mistaken beliefs. Skeptics often wax evangelical and even lapse into ridicule while relentlessly applying that brand of argumentation known lovingly as debunking. They frequently debunk Astrology, Creationism, Holocaust denial, Graphology, UFO Abductions, Satanic Ritual Conspiracies, varieties of phenomena based on the notion of reincarnation, questionable forms of "alternative" medicine, psychic powers, and all sorts of other things that many other people believe.

This is obviously annoying to people who want to believe some of these things, and sometimes even feel that they have perfectly rational reasons for believing them. Reality can be very cruel, and our beliefs, both natural and supernatural, sometimes make the world a little kinder or at least more sane or orderly. Facing commonly held beliefs with a harsh critical eye can make skeptics very unpopular. And the fact that many skeptics are anxious to debunk something doesn't make it untrue or impossible, just as something isn't necessarily true just because millions of people believe it.

Most people agree with skepticism in principle. Applied to other people's wacky beliefs, it seems clever and funny and so true. Until it is turned against our own cherished beliefs.Then it becomes vicious, unreasoning, and closed-minded. No one likes to be told that a comforting or committed belief is mistaken, much less be ridiculed for their beliefs. So skepticism can be very compelling, yet also raises a lot of understandable defensiveness. The skeptic is vulnerable to the same problems as other people; "it's always the other person who is deceiving themselves, not me."

Myths About Scientific Research: Ideas, Not Answers

Most people (non-scientists) think of science as the activity being carried out by what they think of as "scientific institutions." They also associate it with sets of facts and theories that explain those facts. Finally, they may also recognize it as a particular approach, the scientific method, although they think of this as a minor detail.

Scientists themselves instead tend to think of science first in terms of their scientific method, then facts and theories, and finally, they also reluctantly recognize that it also consists of the activities of "scientific institutions" in general.

The difference between these two views is important. It tells us that scientists tend to have a more idealistic view of science than the rest of us. More importantly, it tells us that the public view of what scientists do is full of misunderstandings.

A typical mistaken idea is that science involves building gadgets. Science and technology are actually two different enterprises.⁴ Another common mistake about science is that it simply involves the accumulation of facts. Science works through organizing principles and relationships between principles and data. It does not deal with isolated facts in general, but facts in context.

A more serious error about science is that it distorts reality by limiting human experience. This is true, however it is no more true about science than any other activity. All human activities used to understand and interpret reality, including both science and religion, involve the interplay of observations, laws, theories, and models, and the generation of myths to help create shared beliefs about our world.⁵ Not only does religion sometimes take on some of the patina of science, but science definitely has quasi-religious qualities. The difference that characterizes science is that in the long run, many believe, untruths are generally weeded out, leaving us with a more reliable core of useful ideas.

Probably the most dangerous and pervasive myth about science is that scientific knowledge is truth, in the sense of absolute certainty. The (usually unconsciously held) belief that science offers truth and certainty is known as scientism, or science being treated as if it were a religion. Science is simply not in the business of dealing with ultimate causes or explanations, but with theories subject to modification, and findings that we attempt to interpret in the light of existing theory, or variations of existing theory. Research involves ideas, not answers.

Norms of Science Include Skepticism

Science makes use of a number of different tools, including skepticism. Skepticism is one of the central principles in the conduct of science as we know it today, but it is not the only principle. The sociologist of science Robert K. Merton⁶ identified several "norms" in the conduct of science:

Skepticism -- Scientists should trust no one as an ultimate authority of fact.

Originality -- Scientific results should contribute something new.

Detachment -- Scientists should not commit themselves to one point of view.

Universality -- There are no privileged sources of scientific knowledge.

Public accessibility -- All scientific knowledge should be freely available to anyone, communicated explicitly and unambiguously.

This last norm, public accessibility, is a big part of why scientists find quantification (and mathematics) so important, since it provides a way to communicate ideas in a universally understood way. The use of neutral instrumentation also contributes to public accessibility of knowledge.

These modern norms, applied to the central method of science, empirical observation (especially repeatable empirical observation) results in two special concepts that come up time and time again in the conduct of science:

1. Verifiability of claims -- as a public undertaking, there are standards by which work is judged. Foremost among these are that the claim, if true, contributes something to existing scientific frameworks, and that others can repeat the results.

2. Peer review -- This is the principle by which experts in the same field evaluate a contribution to help determine its value, and the value of subsequent research along similar lines.

It is worth noting that these concepts do not explicitly prevent us from having multiple theories that explain the same observations in different ways. This leads to a political distinction, even within science. Some, the scientific "liberals," believe that multiple scientific theories can be equally valid in explaining the same observations in different ways. Scientific "conservatives" are more concerned that the "right" theory triumphs, so that research funding can be used in a more targeted way, rather than being wasted. A significant portion of people today who call themselves skeptics, such as the skeptical organization CSICOP, are primarily science conservatives, defending conventional scientific theory from "extraordinary claims." These extraordinary claims sometimes involve cutting edge scientific frameworks, though most often they involve clear or highly suspicious cases of pseudoscience or hoaxes.

In the practical conduct of science, we have two big principles. One is the central cognitive construct of deriving theory from laws from experiments from hypotheses from observed facts, combined with the principles of verification and peer review. The second principle of the practical conduct of science is that it is a social activity, where standards for good science are determined by the community in which it is practiced.⁷ Ultimately, this means that theories and research programs are selected as much for political, social, and economic reasons as for reasons involving technical verification.⁸

"...where eminent men disagree violently, and both sides present their cases as proven, we can be rather sure that certainty is not in fact available, and that the matter is not technical but rather trans-scientific. It is a dispute over probabilities, values, desirability, not over facts." -- Henry Bauer.

The result is that science often involves a confrontation between respected, credible people who hold different equally reasonable beliefs, and who may be doing equally "good science," by local criteria. Theories often come into conflict. That's the whole point of scientific progress, that we modify and replace theories based on new evidence. However, scientists in principle, do not simply support their own viewpoint, they learn from each other. Science is based partly on the principles of free speech, but it is not the same as political speech. It is governed by more precisely defined standards of ethical and professional conduct. Scientists not only debate their different beliefs, but also compare their specific findings according to accepted rules of review and discourse. It can be heated and even rancorous at times, but the goal is to focus on the issues and not the personalities involved. Scientists generate a large number of ideas, and test them ruthlessly. The ones that pass their own tests are tested by others in the field. With some growing pains, theories evolve over time. People are not shouted down, their findings are duplicated and debated. The sense of wonder that compels us to explore our reality is tempered and disciplined, not drowned.

While scientists are certainly subject to having their ideas assailed by political speech, and their work influenced by it through protests or funding, this is done peripherally to scientific forums. It is important to keep scientific forums and political forums distinct, because political speech hampers scientific work, and science is only one of many sources of wisdom that inform political decisions. Skeptics debate their ideas about science primarily in political forums, while scientists themselves debate the interpretation of data and theories in scientific forums.

Hallmarks of Pseudoscience

Within a scientific forum, we have two main filters determining what is published to a wider audience. One is editorical review, and the other is peer review. Peer review is public critique by experts, based on additional evidence and alternate interpretations of the same evidence. However, many ideas never get past editorical review to peer review. Results first pass a basic check to determine whether they are even worthy of being published. In addition to standards for submission, such as whether a topic is even appopriate for the journal, the editor also has a number of personal criteria of credibility and subjective, intuitive checks for whether a submission represents scientific work. Among the things an editor looks for are the same things that skeptics look for when they examine an extraordinary claim, the hallmarks or "fingerprints" of pseudoscience⁹:

anachronistic thinking -- presenting a dead issue as if it were still a live debate, especially without offering anything truly novel. For example, a finding claimed to solve the free will/determinism question, or creation vs. evolution.

mystery seeking -- Anomalies are an important part of the progress of science, but scientists do not generally set out to find anomalies. They discover them in the course of their work within existing frameworks. Scientists who seek out anomalies in particular, or who come up with radical new theories just to explain a single anomalous event are treated as suspect. "Anomalists" who go around looking for bizarre events to study may turn up interesting things, but they are not doing science. Some experimental parapsychologists, on the other hand, conducting reasonably conventional experiments within alternative frameworks, are arguably engaged in normal science rather than mystery seeking. One common hallmark of mystery seeking is measuring something that intuitvely seems unlikely but has no real baseline for comparison. The claims of unusual numbers of disappearances in the "Bermuda Triangle" for example turn out to be no mystery at all, the number of disappearances and accidents is statistically related to the number of shipping lanes. More travel through the area than the surrounding area means more ships and planes are lost there.

appeals to myths -- Starting with a myth from ancient times, and then applying scientific methods. This generally ends up with circular reasoning, with the myth providing support for the hypothesis, which is in turn confirmed by the myth in addition to other incidental evidence. Attempts to come up with scientific versions of Creation and other Biblical allegories generally take this form.

casual approach to evidence -- Treating sheer quantity of evidence as more important than quality. Keeping low quality evidence as support of a theory even when it is heavily disputed. Accepting a large number of anecdotes to serve as compelling evidence. Something that is very familiar and widely accepted isn't neccessarily true, as in the alarming spread of false rumors and urban legends.

irrefutable hypotheses -- If there is no evidence that could be used as evidence against a theory, it has no claim to being scientific. No observation could possibly demonstrate to the faithful that God doesn't exist, faith involves irrefutable hypotheses.

spurious similarities -- Comparing unconventional theories to conventional ones that are only vaguely similar, in order to improve credibility. The pseudoscience of biorhythms takes this approach, as does astrology to some degree. Borrowing the tools and language of science doesn't make something scientific.

explanation by scenario -- Scientific explanations for events involve a plausible chain of events. If there are steps (or an initial assumption) in an explanation that have no plausible mechanism (at step 5, a miracle occurs), the whole chain of events is suspect. The controversial catastophe theory of Russian psychoanalyst Immanuel Velikovsky was reasonable except that it rested on several such miraculous events.

research by literary interpretation -- Critiques of research that focus on the words used rather than on the facts and principles they are based upon reveal an inadequate understanding of the research. Pseudoscientsts often act as lawyers using precendents as arguments rather than attending to the details of what is being communicated by scientists, and what their arguments are based upon. While law is necessarily based on precedent, scientific debate is not.

refusal to revise -- Crackpots brag about never being wrong. They manage to turn anything into evidence for their unscientific theories. They use debate as an exercise in rhetorical combat rather than a way of understanding the different viewpoints. Scientists sometimes fall into this trap as well, but they are significantly more open to revising their theories, and more willing to consider contradictory evidence.

correlation implies causation -- epidemiological and socialization research are notorious for demonstrating correlations, which are then widely interpreted by the public and other scientists as showing causation. The practice is widespread in those fields because they rely so heavily on correlation research, and the authors usually include a disclaimer that the correlation could be explained in various ways. Correlations shown in one study may even be unreliable between different studies, due to the way factors are divided up and correlated, and due to the use of marginal significance levels. Unfortunately, the disclaimers are so common that they are generally ignored not only by the media reporting the results, but by other scientists in the same field. The result ? People are constantly treated to "conflicting" research results that undermine confidence in research in general.

Debunking

Debunking, with its not uncommon tone of derision, tends to prevent intelligent discussion, either because it intimidates or makes other people defensive. It is a way of shouting down an opponent by making them look silly or incompetent. One scientist does not debunk the work of another in scientific forums in general practice. Instead, they present conflicting evidence and contrary conclusions. One exception is when a group of scientists collectively decides that another scientist in their field is a "crackpot," violating the basic principles and ethics of their field. They may feel responsible for debunking his work in order to preserve the integrity of their own. Fortunately, this exercise in mob rule doesn't happen very often. I say this is fortunate because it is political speech masquerading as scientific discourse. I also say it is fortunate because the majority opinion can sometimes be wrong. That's why science is partly based on principles of free speech.

Debunking by its very nature tends to use a very authoritative tone, even when not overtly sneering at its target. For this reason, debunking is not generally considered a good professional standard for scientific communication. When skeptics turn their critical essays against scientists for making unusual claims, they often violate the usual standards of professional discourse. If a skeptic cannot explain someone's data, they frequently resort to accusations of fraud out of desperation, because the conclusion still seems improbable, and they are committed to supporting the perspective of conventional science. This is where the standards of skeptical inquiry per se sometimes differ from those of science.

The most annoying thing about skeptics in all of their smirking self-certainty is that they are very often right. Since their targets are improbable beliefs (albeit popular improbable beliefs !) , likelihood is usually with them. So skeptics often perform a very useful service in helping spread the word about certain claims being hoaxes, and others being baloney.

At times, however, extreme skepticism can hurt the progress of knowledge by making scientists reluctant to investigate an area that has been "throughly debunked," for fear of ridicule. The study of perception at the margins of awareness, or "subliminal" perception is a great example of a field that had been "thoroughly debunked," and later revitalized to help us obtain many useful scientific insights. Many important discoveries have come from pursuing variations of research in areas that previously seemed futile.

The natural result of excessive credulity is that we travel down blind alleys and fall prey to charlatans. The natural result of skepticism, when not tempered with a sense of wonder, is the tragedy of premature closure in science. I've seen this acutely in the important study of psychological influences on the human body.

Science sometimes takes up where debunking leaves off: The Placebo

Here's another example of where debunking within science leads to premature closure. Let's look for a moment at that cornerstone of medical debunking, the placebo effect.

Often, testing shows that the effect of a medical treatment is attributable to "the placebo effect." A debunker is satisfied at this point that they have successfully shown the treatment to be useless. Truly, showing that something has an effect attributable to "placebo effect" generally means that it has no active agency besides the mind and body of the recipient.

The problem is that this is sometimes interpreted to mean that there was no effect. Indeed, if you read the way many self-styled "debunkers" define the placebo effect, they clearly misunderstand it. Defining it as something that has no effect, other than that the recipient thinks it has an effect, "pretending" it is affecting them, they miss the science behind this interesting pheonomenon. Fortunately, scientific exploration goes beyond just debunking phenomena and tries to understand what is actually happening. The "pretense" view is both technically and practically incorrect. (See the entry in the Skeptics Dictionary for a technically accurate and interesting discussion of this effect. Also see this recent Skeptical Inquirer article on the subject.)

Prior to 1950, placebos were simply given to patients to meet their expectation to be treated. In the 1950's, however, placebo-controlled research determined that very real and very important therapeutic changes were attributable to the "placebo effect," and that many drugs and even some surgeries actually worked through this effect rather than by any more direct chemical or physical mechanism. Placebos were found to produce clinically signficant changes in pain, asthma, tension, anxiety, depression, blood pressure, heart rate, sexual arousal, skin conditions, nausea, vomiting, gastric motility, and angina.¹⁰

Placebo effects are neither useless nor well understood scientifically. They can be either therapeutic or negative, just like drug effects. So the tendency of debunkers to explain away positive treatment effects as "mere placebos" is a good example of where skepticism sometimes diverges from good science. It obviously helps to know that a particular treatment effect is not due to the active agent being tested. That's as far as a debunker needs to go to show that a treatment probably isn't worth paying for. But to the scientist, it also would help to know why some people responded anyway, so we can use the effect to our benefit. To some scientists, further investigation of placebo effects can yield important information on the conditions under which suggestion and expectancy operate on the body.

A reasonable comparison is sometimes made between placebo responding and hypnotic suggestion. Although they are not exactly the same thing, they are very similar in some ways. This has been used at times to belittle scientific interest in hypnosis and placebo response research, implying that both forms of response are "pretended." There have been a broad range of theories about how suggestion and expectancy influence our experience and our physical responses, but none of the scientifically based theories claims that the responses are faked or pretended. Indeed, the use of hypnotic techniques in psychotherapy has sometimes been found to nearly double its effectiveness.¹¹

Science may sometimes be suppressed by "debunking"

Skepticism without wonder also leads some skeptics to reject evidence in an ostensibly "debunked" field that would be accepted as satisfactory evidence in less controversial fields. The evidence for some anomalies of information and energy transfer is as strong in some ways as the evidence of many better accepted scientific phenomena. However phenomena like telepathy and telekinesis have been "debunked," in the skeptical press, and through political speech by some influential scientists, so scientists studying these anomalies are often targets of ridicule by skeptics. "

"Problems of replication" have been claimed as a reason why such experiments should not be performed, and even used as justification for accusations of fraud or incompetence. Yet many behavioral phenomena that are far less controversial are also difficult to replicate. We respond by further replications and refinements, not by pretending that an embarrasing anomaly doesn't exist. Even if an anomaly might possibly be a statistical artifact or a methodological problem, we need to follow these up to gain a scientific understanding of what is going on. The debunking approach, in contrast, is generally to make some humorous or cynical political speech about research money being wasted on a non-existent phenomenon.

Conclusion

Skeptical speech is an important form of political speech, and principles of critical inquiry should be learned as part of our basic education. The politics of skepticism should be kept out of scientific forums, and the deliberate use of false and malicious ridicule to effectively suppress scientists engaged in controversial research in their attempts to explore the boundaries of our knowledge should be opposed by skeptics, who have the most to lose from incursions on free speech. Remember, intelligent skeptics are among those most actively reviled when mass movements become "witch hunts," and the skeptics speak up against the insanity.

Im my opinion, both skeptical and unconventional scientific viewpoints need to be protected forms of speech, not subject to censorship, either directly by the government or the media, or indirectly by unfair personal attacks in public aimed at swaying public opinion. Scientific ideas need to be tested in the court of science, just as legal ideas are tested in a court of law. Then, what we discover may well be subversive of an existing order, and we might choose not to use that knowledge. That's the proper use of political speech, to discuss what we should do, not what we should know (or what we should hide from ourselves).

It is important that we have processes for limiting the use of technology on humanitarian and moral grounds. However it is also important that those processes not be allowed to put a gag on ethical research that is unpopular solely because it tells us uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our world. (For example, research into supposedly "debunked" areas like psychic phenomena, or areas like sexuality which are unpopular for religious reasons).

We are incapable of knowing everything, we may not even be able to come up with a truly scientific basis for social institutions. Yet we are surely capable of knowing more than we do, using our intelligence better than we do, and becoming more moral, more fair, more responsible, and more caring than we are now. The solutions to our problems will have to come partly from good information from scientfic research, partly from clear thinking about what we discover, partly from the wisdom of our hearts, partly from effective communication with each other about what we should do. This means not only paying scrupulous attention to truth and details, but also caring about each others' welfare enough to make the neccessary sacrifices. One of these sacrifices will surely be to do what is neccessary to raise our children to think clearly for themselves, to care for each other, and to avoid the mistakes that have led us to this period in history ironically combining vast knowledge with vast ignorance and widespread cultural and scientific illiteracy.

Notes

1 See for example Steven Pinker's attempt to synthesize evolutionary psychology with computational theory, How the Mind Works, 1997 from W.W. Norton. See especially chapter 5, Good Ideas.

2 The intuitively odd but very important concept of "self-deception." (See the Skeptics Dictionary entry for more). The notion that we deceive ourselves for our own protection or our own good may seem cynical at first, but it is a notion worth considering on scientific grounds as well. Self-deception can have positive as well as negative implications for our well-being. See S.E. Taylor's 1989 book, Positive Illusions: Creative self-deception and the healthy mind, from Basic Books. A good scholarly analysis of the concept can be found in J.S. Lockard & D.L. Paulus' edited collection: Self-deception: An adaptive mechanism?, from Prentice-Hall.

3 Unlike studying the effects of emotion on our thinking, the study of actual "mental tunnels" in all human thinking can get very technical and mathematical. This is because it involves finding situations where our intuition completely fails us, yet experiments or careful calculations give an accurate result. We hesitate to ignore our intuition and trust our mathematics, even in the face of objective evidence of our fallibility. One of the more accessible books broaching this topic is Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule OurMinds, from Wiley, 1994. Offering an alternate, and sometimes complementary view, are the advocates of the concept of bounded rationality. This view sees such mental tunnels as being of benefit to us, similarly to the way some see self-deception as healthy in some situations. See Gerd Gigerenzer's 1999 volume, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, from Oxford University Press.

4 A very readable and informative book discussing the issues and implications around confusing science and technology is McCain, and E. Segal, The Game of Science, 4th edition, Monterey, CA, Brooks/Cole, 1982.

5 See Barbour, I. (1974). Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion. New York: Harper and Row.