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    A responsible inquirer cannot afford to dismiss out of ha... — Carmelics
    Home/Afterlife & Death
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    A responsible inquirer cannot afford to dismiss out of hand all cases that seem to defy ordinary naturalistic explanation.

    Afterlife & Death
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    2 reasons against

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    Reasons For

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    • 1.The phenomena have been attested as probably veridical by some highly reputable investigators, including philosophers such as William James, Henry Sidgwick, C.D. Broad, H.H. Price, and John Beloff.
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    • 2.These men had little to gain personally by their investigations; indeed in undertaking them they endangered already well-established reputations.
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    • 3.Investigating the subject with finely-honed critical instincts, they applied stringent tests in selecting instances they consider to be credible, and rejected many cases they held to be fraudulent or inadequately attested.
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.The argument from authority commits a well-documented fallacy: even eminent investigators are systematically vulnerable to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.
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    • 2.Historical cases demonstrate that distinguished scientists (e.g., Alfred Russel Wallace, William Crookes) were deceived by skilled fraudsters like the Eddy brothers and Florence Cook.
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    • 3.Reputational risk does not immunize investigators against error; it may instead create psychological pressure to vindicate prior public commitments to the phenomena.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Hume's epistemological principle holds that testimony for miraculous events must be weighed against the base-rate probability of natural alternatives, including fraud, misperception, and confabulation.
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    • 2.The responsible inquirer standard, properly construed, requires proportioning belief to evidence, not treating uneliminated anomalies as credible candidates for supernatural explanation.
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    • 3.A phenomenon resisting ordinary explanation under imperfect investigative conditions is more parsimoniously attributed to methodological limitation than to violations of established natural law.
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    Topics

    Afterlife & Death

    Related

    A phenomenon resisting ordinary explanation under imperfect investigative condit...Historical cases demonstrate that distinguished scientists (e.g., Alfred Russel ...Hume's epistemological principle holds that testimony for miraculous events must...Investigating the subject with finely-honed critical instincts, they applied str...
    +5 moreShow less
    Reputational risk does not immunize investigators against error; it may instead ...The argument from authority commits a well-documented fallacy: even eminent inve...The phenomena have been attested as probably veridical by some highly reputable ...The responsible inquirer standard, properly construed, requires proportioning be...These men had little to gain personally by their investigations; indeed in under...

    Similar

    Investigating the subject with finely-honed critical instincts, they a...64%But assuming naturalism in order to dismiss the desire as evidentially...63%Backwards causation is dubious.61%Prior at least to the advent of DNA testing, cases of disputed identit...61%

    Source

    AI-extracted
    SEP: afterlife
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    The evaluation of this body of evidence is highly contentious. Clearly there exists both motive and opportunity for fraud and fabrication in many cases. It is questionable, though, whether a responsible inquirer can afford to dismiss out of hand all cases that seem to defy ordinary naturalistic explanation. It counts against a sweeping dismissive approach that the phenomena have been attested as probably veridical by some highly reputable investigators, including such philosophers as William James, Henry Sidgwick, C.D. Broad, H.H. Price and John Beloff. These men had little to gain personally ...

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit