Pseudo-Skeptical Science
by Steve Bass, Cert-II
State Section Director, Mutual UFO Network
Fellow, Research Institute on Anomalous Phenomena
Kharkiv, Ukraine
(Copyright © 2009 by Steve Bass. All rights reserved.)
It also takes a commendable amount of courage to expose themselves in front of other intellects and chance the amazing amount of critical examination and ridicule they could face. All total, pseudo-skeptics are a terrible waste of inventiveness and aptitude, all of which could have been put to better use. Pseudo-skeptics are comparable to the teenager with incredible potential that devotes themselves to a life of underachievement.
The truly incredible part of the skeptic/pseudo-skeptic comparison is with whom this evaluation originated. The late Marcello Truzzi was a sociology professor at New College of Florida and Eastern Michigan University. Before he died on February 2, 2003, Truzzi co-founded a group named CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal. Truzzi distanced himself from CSICOP when he began to realize that the organization had become dominated by pseudo-skeptics and was engaging in "bad science". From his commentary On Pseudo-Skepticism, Truzzi states, "In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact." Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of "conventional science" as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis --saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact--he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof". Instead of saying an assertion is not proven, pseudo-skeptics make contrary allegations without themselves providing the scientific proof they so desperately need.
Pseudo-skeptics should become known for what they are, and science will benefit as a result. Science is about unclouded analysis and sometimes the results are vague, but they cannot then be manhandled into being what they are not. A lack of proof does not necessarily mean a lack of truth.
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