Lecture Notes on Boundary Work, New Age Movement, Parapsychology, Skepticism, and Ghost Hunting

Boundary Work and Rationality

  • Boundary work involves competing claims over scientific authority and truth, as defined by David Hess.
  • Movements differentiate themselves by claiming to be more rational than their predecessors:
    • New Agers vs. Spiritualists
    • Parapsychologists vs. Psychical Researchers
    • Skeptics vs. Parapsychologists

The New Age Movement

  • Inspired by spiritualism, emerging in 1971 as an alternative to conventional religions.
  • Decentralized religion:
    • No central leader or hierarchy unlike Catholicism (Pope) or Tibetan Buddhism (Dalai Lama).
  • Gained popularity after the rescission of the Asian Exclusion Act in 1965, leading to an influx of Eastern religious and cultural ideas.
  • Influenced by Eastern religions, such as yoga and meditation.
  • Aims to bridge the gap between science and religion, presenting itself as a rational form of religion.
  • Draws inspiration from:
    • Feminism
    • Environmentalism
    • Biomedicine
    • Psychotherapy
    • Non-Western philosophies
  • Incorporates various influences:
    • Music
    • Chakras (from Hinduism)
    • Tarot cards
    • Runestones (Nordic divination)
    • Western medicine
    • Oils from botanicas
    • Crystals (crystal healing)
  • Anti-capitalist and anti-environmental destruction.
  • Practitioners of yoga, acupuncture, reiki, aromatherapy, and homeopathy see the cure as proof of their beliefs.
  • Pro-science through the interest in proof, facts, and the scientific method.
  • Anti-science due to beliefs about science destroying the environment.
  • Has no centralized leader.

Parapsychology

  • Rooted in psychical research but views itself as more scientific than earlier psychical researchers and spiritualists.
  • Early psychical research:
    • Focused on investigating mediums and proving/disproving the existence of an afterlife.
    • Committees on haunted houses, full-body apparitions, and mediumistic phenomena.
  • By the 1960s, shifted focus due to embarrassment from fraudulent mediums like Marjorie Crandon (who used cheesecloth to fake phenomena).
  • Shift from survival of consciousness to exceptional mental states like ESP (extrasensory perception).
  • Too hard to study survival of consciousness. William James' 25-year study of Lenora Piper yielded no conclusive results.
  • Researchers rebranded from psychical researchers to psi researchers or anomaly researchers.
  • Researchers were mainly academics with PhDs in psychology or MDs.
  • Shifted from qualitative methods (case studies, interviews, observations) to quantitative research (collecting numbers, statistics).
  • Focusing on narrower patterns of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis.
  • Abandoned the question of post-mortem survival of the soul indefinitely.
  • Shift from societies like ASPR or SPR to universities and private research foundations, focusing on ESP and abnormal psychology.
  • Well-known university labs: Duke University and University of Arizona (currently defunded).
  • Experiments in controlled settings:
    • Predicting dice rolls: Random chance is 1/6 (approximately 15-16%). Statistically significant results exceed this percentage.
    • Zener cards: Sender/receiver setup to test telepathy. Random chance is 25%; results above this are anomalous.
    • Sleep studies: Correlating dreams with brain activity at Naimonides Hospital, hypothesizing that individuals are more receptive to ESP during sleep.
    • Ganzfeld test: Sensory deprivation to enhance telepathic communication.
  • Areas of study:
    • Telekinesis: Moving objects with the mind (e.g., spoon bending).
    • Clairvoyance: Farsight, seeing events in other locations in real-time. (Experiment: Remote viewers).
    • Telepathy: Mind reading, tested with Zener cards (e.g., remote senders/receivers).
    • Precognition: Predicting future events, often studied through dream research.
  • Tested variables conducive to ESP:
    • Gender (women during menstrual cycle).
    • Creative professions (artists, sculptors).
    • Age, gender, and ethnicity.
  • Shift in scope from survival of the soul to exceptional mental states.
  • Terminology shift from paranormal phenomena to scientific anomalies for legitimacy.
  • Methods shifted from open societies to university laboratories.
  • Parapsychologists do not study the survival of the human soul after death.

Skepticism

  • Skeptics view themselves as more legitimate than parapsychologists.
  • Emerged alongside psychical research in the 19th century.
  • Early skeptics: Harry Houdini and magicians debunked spiritualist mediums.
  • Social mission: Debunk and demystify spiritualism.
  • Rejection of psychical research: Any study of the supernatural or afterlife is considered illegitimate.
  • Skeptics come from hardcore scientists and scientific community.
  • Emergence of secular humanism: A philosophy that seeks morality and ethics without religion.
    • Anti-religion, teaching morality without the promise of heaven or the punishment of hell.
    • Rejects religious dogma, superstition, and pseudoscience (e.g., Scientology).
    • Values reason, ethics, and philosophical naturalism.
  • Morality from secular humanism:
    • Humans can be moral without God because of intellect, consciousness, understanding consequences, and empathy.
    • Based on reason, experience, empathy, and respect for others.
    • Morality is internal, not from external authority (God).
    • Values freedom, justice, happiness, equality, and fairness.
  • Secular humanism addresses social anxieties from religion-science debates after Darwin's theory of natural selection.
  • Where does goodness come from?
    • Empathy
    • Lack of selfishness
    • Experience
    • Golden rule (treating others as you'd like to be treated).
  • Death in secular humanism:
    • Death is the end; no afterlife.
    • Focus on finding meaning and purpose in the present.
    • Live on through work and memories of others.
    • Bodies return to the cycle of nature.
  • Alternative moralities:
    • Naturalism: Morality based on natural selection and interconnectedness, valuing all living things.
  • How do we extend morality?
    • Consideration of AI and robots, raising questions about consciousness and treatment.
  • Boundary work: Each movement attempts to establish itself as the authority on knowledge, differentiating science from non-science.
  • Hess argues that boundaries between science and pseudoscience are shaped by competing claims of legitimacy.
  • Boundaries between science and non-science are not objective, obvious, or permanent but political and historically contingent.
  • New Age, parapsychology, and skepticism are expressions of American values of self-reliance, individualism, and egalitarianism.
  • The paranormal is a new expression of skepticism based on empirical knowledge of experiences.
  • These movements indicate that Americans are skeptical of orthodoxy and authorities.
  • American independence and self-reliance are part of the national identity.
  • Self-help and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are related American traditions.
  • Paranormal tells us that we are a nation of skeptics.
  • Royal Society motto: Nullius in verba (On no one's word).
  • Empirical evidence is used in:
    • The New Age movement.
    • Parapsychology.
    • Skepticism.
    • Ghost hunting.
  • Skepticism is cannot exist without cyclical research, as it's a reaction to an action.

Ghost Hunting

  • Current phenomenon: 60% of Americans believe in creationism and proclaim respect for science.
  • Contradiction in American society between science and religion.
  • Ghost hunting attempts to reimagine ghosts as scientific objects of inquiry.
  • Ghost hunters are normal, everyday people (plumbers, electricians, contractors) without advanced scientific degrees.
  • Ghost hunters must make themselves legitimate through:
    • Objectivity
    • Not charging for investigations.
    • Collecting evidence using scientific tools (audio recorders, video recorders, EMF detectors).
    • Analyzing data.
    • Client obligations and keeping scrupulous records.
  • Ghost hunting is an expression of American skepticism versus dogmaticism.
  • Pre-investigation process includes:
    • 10-page survey for clients.
    • Questions about mental health and background.
    • List of client medications.
    • Legal waivers.
  • Dom, a sound engineer and ghost hunter, operates Paranormal NYC.
  • Dom's investigation process:
    • Interviewing clients to assess the seriousness of the call.
    • Using tools like electromagnetic field detectors, temperature sensors, and frequency meters.
    • Looking for drastic temperature changes.
    • Asking questions and recording responses.
  • Misconceptions about paranormal activity:
    • Alarm clocks and old houses can cause strange phenomena.
  • Dom's approach to asking questions:
    • Treats spirits as friends, using compassionate communication.
  • Dom's motivation:
    • Life-long interest in what happens after death.
  • Influence of Ghostbusters: The movie, in a very funny way, hit on a lot of things in that was kind of accurate.
  • Dom has never seen absolute proof of paranormal activity.
  • Dom focuses on helping people and believes that proving is a long way off.
  • Ghost hunters seek to rule out, not prove, phenomena
  • Theories
    • Intelligent hauntings: Spirits of the deceased interact with the living.
    • Residual hauntings: Energy imprints recorded in objects or structures (rainstorms or lightning can trigger energy to play). Cannot have interactions.
    • Psychological hauntings
    • Poltergeists
    • Possessions