The Crisis of Professional Skepticism

Leading skeptics fail the test of “extraordinary evidence”

“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese.” Marley’s ghost visiting Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843), illustration by John Leech. (Public Domain Review)

Friends, I am reproducing this article gratis. I have a purpose in doing so. I wish to earn nothing from the intellectual vacuity of pseudo-skepticism, even when, as here, I correct its excesses. This piece originally appeared February 27, 2023, at Medium. -M-

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’Tis safer to be that which we destroy,

Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

— Lady Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 2

A brilliant 20th century sociologist Marcello Truzzi (1935–2003) called himself a “constructive skeptic” of paranormal phenomena.

In 1975 and again in 1978, Truzzi, a man of even temperament, refined ethics, and dedicated but authentically questioning skepticism, stated a principle—not wholly original to him—that was later popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan.

Truzzi’s maxim was: “An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.” [1] The widely quoted precept, redubbed the “Sagan standard,” was repeated by the televised astronomer in 1980 as: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Truzzi resigned from the professional skeptics’ organization he cofounded, Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), now Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), about a year after its 1976 launch. Truzzi protested the group’s dominance by “pseudo-skeptics” more interested in injurious behavior toward claimants of the paranormal versus actual skeptical inquiry. [2]

“I found myself attacked by the Committee members and board, who considered me to be too soft on the paranormalists,” he later wrote. “My position was not to treat protoscientists as adversaries, but to look to the best of them and ask them for their best scientific evidence. I found that the Committee was much more interested in attacking the most publicly visible claimants . . . The major interest of the Committee was not inquiry but to serve as an advocacy body, a public relations group for scientific orthodoxy.” [3]

The problem that the sociologist described has endured. In recent talks and writing I have noted the intellectual crisis of professional skepticism. “This kind of practice,” I wrote in 2022 in Daydream Believer, “in which self-perceived rationalists do injustice to truth in pursuit of what they consider a defense of rationalism, has run riot throughout the professional skeptics’ field.”

A case appears in a book I recently read, On The Wild Side (1992), a collection of columns by Martin Gardner (1914–2010), one of the 20th century’s most influential and prolific critics of parapsychology, sometimes called “the godfather of the skeptical movement.” [4] Gardner, like me, was not a scientist but a writer and lay observer.

2004 edition

About half of Gardner’s pieces originally ran in Skeptical Inquirer magazine, a leading organ of professional skepticism, and are unfortunately undated. Most, however, are augmented with addenda where the author highlights new information.

Gardner’s opening chapter, “The Obligation to Disclose Fraud,” excoriates parapsychologist J.B. Rhine (1885–1980)—the field’s pioneering and best known figure—for failing to reveal the identity of a prominent cheater at Rhine’s ESP lab in the early 1970s:

Rhine tried his best to hush up the scandal; but when it was obvious he could not do so he wrote an apologetic article about it in his journal. As usual he did not mention [Walter] Levy’s name, apparently under the delusion that readers would not learn the flimflammer’s identity.

Passage from Gardner’s chapter, “The Obligation to Disclose Fraud.”

In fact, Rhine wrote back-to-back columns on the scandal: “A New Case of Experimenter Unreliability,” Journal of Parapsychology 38, 1974, and “Second Report on a Case of Experimenter Fraud,” Journal of Parapsychology, 39, 1975. In his second piece (as seen below), Rhine identified the cheater in his opening line.

Regarding his earlier “delusion that readers would not learn the flimflammer’s identity,” Rhine initially wrote, “Any reader can easily discover Dr. W’s name if he wishes. Regular readers will know before finishing this article. The purpose here is not to hide that information from anyone needing it, but to encourage respect for proper personal rights and those innocent people in W’s nonparapsychological circles.”

The opening page of Rhine’s 1975 piece.

Gardner misstated the facts, which were long available. I wrote critically about the lab deception myself in 2022:

In the early 1970s, J.B. Rhine’s then-independent lab (faced with declining institutional support his center had migrated off [Duke University’s] campus) was itself rocked by a fraud scandal. A charismatic and driven medical student handpicked by Rhine as his institutional successor was caught faking results. Rhine was resolute and transparent in rooting out and exposing the fraud and laying groundwork for improvements.

But Rhine cannot wholly be spared blame. He handpicked his own Judas. “He had barely been there three years,” wrote authorized biographer Denis Brian, “when, in 1973, Rhine appointed this man in his early twenties director of the institute.” [5]

It is possible that Rhine, a former Marine with square-jawed good looks and poised manners, saw in this “bright young dynamo” a formidable newcomer who could take parapsychology to its next stage of public acceptance. From my perspective, it would have been wiser for Rhine to place his stock in the less-Olympian looking but more integral and erudite Charles Honorton (1946–1992) with whom Rhine never seemed to personally connect. Although Honorton’s career was cut short by ill-health, the scientist proved the field’s natural intellectual heir, but without the garland of institutional inheritance. [6]

In his same chapter, however, Gardner—without sourcing—accused one of Rhine’s most notable subjects, Hubert Pearce (d. 1979), of fraud. In 1931–1934, Rhine tested Pearce, then a Duke divinity student, for ESP hits on Zener cards.

This time, Gardner added an addendum further impugning Pearce—again without sourcing—and relying, now twice, on the phrase, “I have been told . . .” None of his charges are otherwise backed.

Passage from Gardner.

Gardner again.

As it happens, Pearce had already replied to Gardner, which goes unmentioned. The skeptic wrote Pearce, then a Methodist minister, in 1956 apparently asking if he would like to come clean about practices in the lab. I do not have Gardner’s original letter. Pearce’s son, Warren, recalled: “Martin [Gardner] was clearly questioning Dad’s honesty in the tests by asking him if it hadn’t been long enough that my father’s conscience was bothering him to where he was ready to confess that the work there was not well controlled, etc.”

In a letter archived in the special collections library at Duke, Pearce responded on September 27, 1956:

Dear Mr. Gardner:-

Upon return from a trip to Durham and Washington I found your interesting letter. I will have to admit that is a new approach and I wish that I might have had it to show to Dr. Rhine. Of course, you realize that it isn’t deserving of a respectable reply. There are a lot of things that might be said to express my opinion of it — and probably of you.

May I say simply that I am as much interested in the project now as I was when I was in the University and the longer I live the more I become convinced of its reality.

Those of us who have worked with Dr. Rhine have never once doubted his ability as a scientist and research director, his devotion to the Truth, his brilliance, or his integrity.

You are simply beating again the path that was beat by Experts in the 1930s.

The day will come when Dr. Rhine’s name will be among the Immortals — and the names of his critics forgotten.

Sincerely,

Hubert E. Pearce

Pearce’s 1956 letter from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

Gardner appears to parenthetically reference Pearce’s reply in “Funny Coincidence,” The New York Review of Books, May 26, 1966: “(I once tried to get a few easily remembered details out of Pearce by correspondence—he is now a Methodist minister in Arkansas—but he flatly refused to discuss the incident).”

By “the incident,” Gardner references a singular trial where Pearce scored 25/25 on Zener cards; Gardner gives no evidence of Pearce-Rhine malpractice but notes that Rhine, as was his custom, invited a prominent British skeptic, C.E.M. Hansel, “to visit his laboratory, then affiliated with Duke University, to look over his records. This proved to be bad judgment.” Leaving aside the visiting skeptic’s nearly vaudevillian supposition that Pearce repeatedly crawled through a ceiling space to peek at cards through a trapdoor over the lab [7], consider the appalling cynicism of Gardner’s riposte. How can research transparency ever be “bad judgment”?

Pearce and Rhine experimenting with Zener cards at at Duke University, 1934. (Wikimedia Commons)

This is not the first time this side of Gardner has been noted. In George P. Hansen’s The Trickster and the Paranormal—which offers a more temperate and appreciative assessment of Gardner than my own—he writes of the skeptic’s encounters with Czech ESP subject Pavel Štěpánek (b. 1931):

Gardner wrote to Stepanek and suggested that he give an interview describing how he cheated. Gardner offered to help publicize it and arrange for a documentary film that would bring him money and fame. Stepanek refused, a fact that tends to support his honesty. Some may see Gardner’s attempt as one of bribery to suborn testimony. He seems to have been embarrassed by the matter, and when his letter to Stepanek became known, he threatened to sue if it was published.

Hansen sources his account to a letter by Czech biochemist and parapsychologist Milan Ryzl (1928–2011) in the Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 54, September 1990. Ryzl’s letter, worthy of reading in itself, can be viewed here and I reproduce two passages below:

A passage (I) from Ryzl’s 1990 letter.

A passage (II) from Ryzl’s 1990 letter.

Gardner’s standards reflect an extant pattern among many professional skeptics, most notably the sole figure who surpasses his public prominence, James Randi (1928–2020), whose career I considered in my October 26, 2020, article “The Man Who Destroyed Skepticism.”

Et Tu, Richard?

This issue is not limited to the “inside baseball” of skeptic-parapsychogist debates. In his famous 1974 commencement address at Caltech, “Cargo Cult Science,” physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) pilloried purveyors of “junk” and “pseudoscience” like ESP, UFOs, and astrology. The problem, Feynman said, is embracing confirmation or correlation versus laboring to disprove a hypothesis. Ironically, the Nobel Prize laureate identified the same pattern—belief aforethought—into which professional skeptics commonly fall. Rather than honoring Feynman’s arch imperative to disprove one’s favored hypotheses, CSICOP’s executive director, Lee Nisbet, told Science magazine in 1977: “We feel it is the duty of the scientific community to show that these beliefs are utterly screwball.”

On January 8, 1979, theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) stumbled in his effort to get the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to expel the Parapsychological Association, a professional society for parapsychologists, which has now been affiliated with the AAAS since 1969. In a question-and-answer period following Wheeler’s address at the AAAS’s annual meeting—which included his paper “Drive the Pseudos Out of the Workshop of Science” (also reprinted in The New York Review of Books)—the physicist falsely accused Rhine, then 83, of fraud as a student, noting “he started parapsychology that way.” Although unchallenged at the Houston conference, which Rhine did not attend, the physicist stingily retracted his charge, accompanied by Rhine’s response, in Science magazine: “Parapsychology—A Correction” [8]

Wheeler’s recantation.

Facts, at Last

In 2020, parapsychologist Rick Berger, Ph.D., broke down Rhine’s ESP data for the Parapsychological Association: “In the five years following Rhine’s first publication of his results, 33 independent replication experiments were conducted at different laboratories. Twenty (20) of these (or 61%) were statistically significant (where 5% would be expected by chance alone).” Honorton noted, “This is 60 times the proportion of significant studies we would expect if the significant results were due to chance or error.” [9]

Lessons learned? When I documented Rhine’s legacy in 2022, a tenured social scientist and psi skeptic summarily posted: “Card tricks? Magicians have a million of ‘em.” My respondent’s faculty biography notes his aim of facilitating an intellectual environment of open exchange and exploration of the broadest possible breadth of ideas. To honor Rhine’s principle “to encourage respect for proper personal rights,” I am forgoing name and affiliation.

In more recent research, I consider here the skeptical response to now-replicated precognition experiments at Cornell University—including how skeptics withheld confirmatory data and used insinuation to impugn psychologist Daryl J. Bem, who likewise went to great lengths of transparency, acknowledged even by his critics:

Who Cares?

One may fairly ask whether any of this brouhaha finally matters. I believe so on two levels: 1) This kind of misinformation is often recycled in journalism and reference literature, particularly the world’s go-to resource, Wikipedia. As I noted in Daydream Believer:

Rhine himself has fared little better on Wikipedia. As of this writing, the biographical article on him is rife with sui generis statements and a plurality of references to books published by Prometheus Books, a Buffalo, New York, press aligned with professional skepticism. The article’s declarations are often worded evasively and referenced tautologically, e.g., “It was revealed that Rhine’s experiments into extrasensory perception (ESP) contained methodological flaws”—this is footnoted to a book called Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends . . . and Pseudoscience Begins by Charles M. Wynn and Arthur W. Wiggins (Joseph Henry Press, 2001), a slender volume with cartoons that lampoons psychical research (and oddly groups Holocaust denial among its topics). Wiki’s footnote is keyed to this passage: “[Rhine] suggested that something more than mere guess work was involved in his experiments. He was right! It is now known that the experiments conducted in his laboratory contained serious methodological flaws. . .,” which then misstates Rhine’s testing methods from which the authors speculate over frauds, such as “subjects could see card faces reflected in the tester’s eyeglasses or cornea.” In its review, Publisher’s Weekly called the sourcebook “lightweight” and concluded, “It won’t be long before this title takes a quantum leap into the remainder bins.” In another almost humorous passage of the article, professional skeptic Martin Gardner is quoted criticizing Rhine for insufficient disclosure regarding fraud, followed by Gardner’s suggestion of his own secret knowledge of compromising files hidden in the Rhine labs. This reflects the present state of crowdsourcing that Wikipedia permits to define Rhine’s career.

2) We urgently need good skeptics, worthy of the term. Neither parapsychology, nor any science, can thrive without them.

Inclosing, I want to add a personal note. My sympathies for parapsychology are self-evident. I openly describe myself as a critical but “believing historian” of the occult and esoteric, and I spent years as a publisher of New Age literature. I am hardly anyone’s idea of a poster child for disinterest. But if my approach here is reproving, I hope it is attributable to something beyond those factors.

In years of personal encounters, I have observed—and I am unsure why—that the field of professional skepticism, including bloggers, writers, Wiki contributors, and some scientists, seems to attract an outsized number of cynics. They appear convinced that others harbor similar values and, in my observation, many seem unable to recognize transparency and good practices. Indeed, it may be a general malady of human nature that we cannot see traits other than our own. (This may explain pseudo-skeptic overuse of the shopworn term “grifter.”)

Or perhaps what I describe is intrinsic to the field. Hansen observed, “Over seventy years ago, Walter Franklin Prince described the ‘enchanted boundary’ and explained that when skeptics cross it they generally display loosening of intellectual judgment and emotional restraint. Gardner is a good example.”

On different terms, spiritual philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) observed “how the line of the development of forces deviates from its original direction and goes, after a certain time, in a diametrically opposite direction, still preserving its former name.” [10]

In any case, the crisis of professional skepticism now presents an irony in which self-perceived defenders of reason brutalize truth in its name. That is the antithesis of science, good criticism, and good ethics. Our culture needs a new cohort of skeptics who strive to do better.

Footnotes

[1] Zetetic Scholar, Volume 1, Number 1, 1978, a journal Truzzi founded. In The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime (Mysterious Press, 1991), Truzzi and coauthor Arthur Lyons expanded on the sociologist’s principle:

Evidence is always a matter of degree. And evidence of the blue sense [the authors’ term for crime-solving intuition] does not yet meet the heavy burden of proof many scientists demand for validation of what they see as such extraordinary claims. To the hard-line skeptic, the case for the blue sense remains not proved. However, as we have repeatedly noted, nonproof does not constitute disproof. The case for the blue sense may not be totally convincing, but it is far more substantial than many critics have presumed. And not all scientists take the hard-line position. Extraordinariness is also a matter of degree, and among the sciences it is mainly psychology that judges the blue sense contrary to orthodoxy. For the many scientists less impressed by the materialistic orientation dominant in today’s psychology, intuition remains largely a mystery and perhaps even transcendent human capacity. Thus, informed scientists can still reasonably differ about the nature of the blue sense.

[2] “Marcello Truzzi, 67; Sociologist Who Studied the Supernatural” by Douglas Martin, New York Times, February. 9, 2003.

[3] “Reflections on the Reception of Unconventional Claims in Science,” colloquium presented by Marcello Truzzi, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University at Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Director, Center for Scientific Anomalies Research, Ann Arbor, MI, November 29, 1989.

[4] “Gardner is justifiably referred to as the godfather of the skeptical movement,” writes parapsychologist George P. Hansen in The Trickster and Paranormal (2001). Hansen’s self-published study of parapsychological research includes a substantial — and not unadmiring — assessment of Gardner, as well as useful, critical assessments of parapsychology.

[5] The Enchanted Voyager: The Life of J.B.Rhine (Prentice-Hall, 1982).

[6] I write further of Honorton:

One of the most important figures in psychical research died of heart failure in 1992 at the tragically young age of 46. I referenced him earlier. His name is Charles Honorton, known to friends as Chuck. He had struggled with lifelong health issues. Honorton’s passing was a tremendous loss for the field. It was the near-equivalent to losing Einstein at the dawn of his relativity theories. It is critical to understand what Honorton accomplished. The self-taught researcher began corresponding with J.B. Rhine from his St. Paul, Minnesota, home at age 13 after he had consumed all of the books on parapsychology at his local library. The prodigy ventured on an internship to the Parapsychology Laboratory in Durham at age 15. Precocious, dogged, idealistic, and possessed of a razor-sharp intellect, Honorton began studying at the University of Minnesota but returned to Duke to work with Rhine. He never completed his degree, a point of contention between the newcomer and his mentor. Indeed, J.B. seemed not to have fully recognized Honorton’s virtuosity at the time. Honorton was interested in studying psi under conditions of hypnosis, an area that did not specifically interest J.B., and the younger man often felt put off from his planned experiments.

[7] For the skeptic’s report, see ESP and Parapsychology: A Critical Re-Evaluation by C.E.M.Hansel (Prometheus Books, 1980). Critiques appear in “Rhetoric over substance: the impoverished state of skepticism” by Charles Honorton, Journal of Parapsychology, June 1993; and Stacy Horn’s account of the Rhine labs, Unbelievable (HarperCollins/ Ecco, 2009). For responses to Gardner’s article, see “Was He Peeking?, The New York Review of Books, July 28, 1966, letters from J.G. Pratt and Bob Brier.

[8] Stacy Horn considers the AAAS episode further in her November 11, 2009, article, “BettyMac Takes on John Archibald Wheeler.”

[9] “Has Science Developed the Competence to Confront the Paranormal?” by Charles Honorton, Extrasensory Perception, Vol. 2, edited by Edwin C. May and Sonali Bhatt Marwaha (Praeger, 2015).

[10] In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by P. D. Ouspensky (Harcourt Brace, 1949).

Addendum

Shortly after this article posted, journalist and researcher Stacy Horn sent me from her records a copy of Martin Gardner’s reply to Hubert Pearce, In the interest of fairness and others’ research, I am reproducing it here:

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