{"id":896,"date":"2013-08-05T19:31:19","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T09:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/?p=896"},"modified":"2013-08-05T19:57:34","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T09:57:34","slug":"on-being-skeptical-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2013\/08\/05\/on-being-skeptical-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"On being skeptical (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I discussed in my talk<\/a>\u00a0at TAM2013<\/a>, I take contemporary scientific skepticism to be a certain resistance to\u00a0– cum<\/em> suspicion of, cum<\/em> tendency to scrutinise harshly –\u00a0claims\u00a0about the reality of\u00a0phenomena that would be anomalous within our developing scientific worldview. The scientific skeptic movement is a collective and somewhat organised version of this attitude.<\/p>\n

For example, scientific skeptics\u00a0will\u00a0take a\u00a0resistant\/suspicious\/harshly scrutinising\u00a0attitude to\u00a0the claim that reincarnation is a real phenomenon. The justification for this is that reincarnation does\u00a0not\u00a0readily fit\u00a0within\u00a0the picture of the world built up\u00a0by science. If the evidence for it became so compelling that we concluded it\u00a0must be\u00a0a real phenomenon, we would need to overturn and revise much of\u00a0our scientific understanding of how the world works. Putting this in another way, the whole extraordinary (from, say, a 15th-century perspective) record\u00a0of science in building\u00a0its world picture through evidence stands in the balance\u00a0against the reality of reincarnation.<\/p>\n

That is not a reason to close our\u00a0minds completely against reincarnation claims. But it is a\u00a0reason to regard such claims, in current circumstances, as remotely unlikely to turn out to\u00a0be true. Given the total evidence supporting the current scientific picture, reincarnation claims should be given a prior assessment as highly implausible and improbable. We should treat them as extraordinary and ask for exceptionally powerful\u00a0evidence before we believe them.<\/p>\n

Not all claims that we should now regard as extraordinary are anomalous in this strong sense – i.e. that our whole scientific picture would have to be revised if they were true – but many at least run up against well-established scientific findings, the evidence for which\u00a0thus stands as\u00a0evidence against them. Others run up against well-established findings from empirical disciplines outside of what is usually regarded as “science” in English-speaking countries, such as history. For example, we should regard the claims of Holocaust denialists as extraordinary, even though resistance to them may not be central to the mission of scientific skepticism. Because of the\u00a0close analogy, scientific skeptics should find these sorts of claims troubling and be interested in what happens when they are scrutinised.<\/p>\n

There is no real doubt that the Holocaust, much as it is usually described, including the murders\u00a0of almost 6 million Jews, actually took place. We might once have had reason to doubt this, given the sheer scale and horror of the crimes involved, as well as historical experience with atrocity propaganda.\u00a0However, we actually have the extensive and compelling evidence in this case. What about other cases where we do not have it?<\/p>\n

As a generalisation, it remains true that atrocity stories are often\u00a0exaggerated, false, or even fraudulent – and\u00a0we would always\u00a0do well to be suspicious of atrocity stories that are employed\u00a0by our political leaders\u00a0as\u00a0justifications to go to war (or continue fighting a war). Sometimes these stories have an element of truth, but sometimes they collapse entirely under investigation. Given the human tendency to\u00a0believe such stories about supposed enemies, the ease with which they can be\u00a0fabricated and spread,\u00a0the\u00a0motivation for very powerful players (such as governments) to do exactly\u00a0that, and the difficulty in investigating these stories, we should\u00a0be suspicious of them. Extending this reasoning\u00a0beyond atrocities in the strict\u00a0sense, these considerations also apply to such claims as that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction at the time of the last Gulf War.<\/p>\n

Moreover, many strong claims made by social scientists and humanities scholars, even perfectly reputable ones,\u00a0may have nothing like the empirical backing possessed by say, heliocentric theory in astronomy, evolutionary theory in biology, or the\u00a0knowledge of the Holocaust possessed by historians. These disciplines are often rife with\u00a0contested findings, heavily divided along political lines, and in a state that is, at best, pre-scientific (with no established and generally agreed theoretical paradigm yet prevailing). That is not a reason\u00a0for excessive skepticism – clearly much honest, brilliant,\u00a0and rigorous work goes on in all these fields – but it is certainly a reason for some suspicion when we are\u00a0confronted\u00a0with\u00a0findings that appear to run up against common experience or\u00a0where the data presented\u00a0are open to multiple interpretations.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that there is\u00a0scope for much reflection about how far scientific skepticism, or something analogous to\u00a0it, should apply to\u00a0claims that run counter\u00a0to current fashion\u00a0in academic economics, say, or in academic literary criticism. These fields doubtless do produce robust, powerfully evidenced knowledge. But\u00a0they also produce much that is deservedly controversial or even worthy of suspicion. Entire schools of, say, economic thought,\u00a0with numerous adherents, may be open to legitimate doubt.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow, I want to explore another aspect of all this. In many situations, the evidence for and against certain claims is just very murky – getting to the truth seems difficult, perhaps requiring\u00a0settling the truth of numerous other claims first before we can even know what the evidence really amounts to one way or the other. Given our limited resources, as individuals and collectively, it may often be almost impossible to establish the truth in any way that we could be confident about if we were entirely honest. In some circumstances, critical evidence may be lost or\u00a0unobtainable. Thus, although there will be some truth as to which claims correspond to reality, there may be no investigative approach\u00a0that can\u00a0tell us decisively, or even\u00a0with a high degree of confidence, what the truth actually is. How should rational and reasonable people respond in these situations, which may be more common, or even typical,\u00a0than we’d like to believe?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I discussed in my talk\u00a0at TAM2013, I take contemporary scientific skepticism to be a certain resistance to\u00a0– cum suspicion of, cum tendency to scrutinise harshly –\u00a0claims\u00a0about the reality of\u00a0phenomena that would be anomalous within our developing scientific worldview. The scientific skeptic movement is a collective and somewhat organised version of this attitude. For example, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[313,312,75,265,131,314],"class_list":["post-896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-science","tag-history-2","tag-holocaust-denial","tag-science-2","tag-scientific-skepticism","tag-skepticism-2","tag-uncertainty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}