Or groups of individuals? Most science does have a role for observation.
Theoretical physics for one is not based on observation.
Even where science is based upon observation, the use of observation does not make the evidence anecdotal, since scientific evidence is amenable to statistical analysis and anecdotal evidence is not.
What the proponents of dowsing have been giving here is a testimonial, absent of evidence, absent of analysis, absent of statistics. When dowsing is examined within the confines of the scientific method, utilising double-blind studies with appropriate controls, dowsing cannot be shown to work better than random chance, which rather precludes further analysis.
Umm no, you appear to misunderstand the term or to be willfully misusing it.
However to state that dowsing has not been proved to work because it's proponents producing nothing but anecdotal evidence is correct.
"Each dowser goes away from any trial of their powers, dismayed by their failure, puzzled at the reasons for the failure, but always capable of coming up with a reasonable to them excuse. That excuse may be any one of many. It may be an unfortunate arrangement of the planets, improper temperature or humidity, a problem of indigestion, too much ambient noise or too much silence or a poor attitude on the part of the observers. These are not invented excuses; they are all drawn from my personal experience in testing these folks.
"I must say that of all those who have ever tried to win the Pigasus Prize, and of those who I have otherwise tested in every part of the world, no claimants even approach the dowsers for honesty. These are persons who are genuinely, thoroughly, self-deceived. In only two instances one in Australia and the other in the U.K. did I ever encounter any cheating being tried by dowsers. And those cases were easily solved and immediately terminated."
'Anecdotal' is when Bill tells Ben about something he has seen, and Ben has to take Bill's word for it because Ben cannot also make the observation. If Ben can go and see for himself, it's not anecdotal. That still doesn't make either Bill's or Ben's theories about the phenomenon correct, but if anyone can test those theories, sooner or later any holes will be found. Think of it as Open Source in action.
Cold fusion looked at first to be 'scientific', but turned out to be 'anecdotal'. We're back to repeatability. It can, of course, go the other way: something that is anecdotal can become repeatable when someone spots a condition which was not being replicated correctly in trials. It may be that we do not yet know the factor which would make dowsing repeatable at will. The position of the planets, the date of birth of the dowser, the number of witnesses...
You went from saying "science is based on the summation of anecdotes" to saying that scientific observation "could be classed as anecdotal". That sure as shit looks like back-pedalling to me.
Quite so. But that isn't the whole of scientific method.
Huh? Now you're contradicting yourself.
Except that I didn't. I'm quite happy to see rigorous scientific investigation of all paranormal phenomena.
Thanks for that! Thus encouraged, let me expand a bit on my model of scientific method. The big question in philosophy has always been (more or less) what can we know? After Newton, that changed: he showed clearly what we know, and so the question became How? How did he get to this absolute and invariant knowledge? You see Kant in particular wrestling with this question, but up to the start of 20C it was on everyone's agenda. So science was seen as developing clever ways of getting at these brute facts, and remarkably successful too; think of Clerk Maxwell, interestingly able to "correct" Ampère's Law. Of course there was a lot of careful experimentation but increasingly physics became dominated by the theoreticians; as Rutherford put it: "All science is physics or stamp collecting" -- and physics, one could say, was maths backed up by experiment. Scientific law therefore embodied two vital facts: repeatable experiment and an explanation. As Pope put it: "Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light."
Then after Eddington provided some support for Einstein's gravitational theory and propelled him into the limelight with his other theories, everything changed. Squire put it neatly "It did not last: the Devil, shouting 'Ho, Let Einstein be' restored the status quo". Suddenly the whole concept of science changed: we cannot after all get at brute fact, only make more-or-less inaccurate models of our world. Many of those models aren't even required to make *sense* at all (in a matter-of-fact sense): do superstrings "exist"? how does one understand the inside of a black hole?
To my mind the best description of this change, and of what science is (or should be) about, is Karl Popper (_Logic of Scientific Discovery_). And Popper's argument is that, since we cannot know that a theory is right but can discover where it is wrong, we should as he says, make our mistakes as quickly as possible; science is the exercise of *destroying* our theories, not establishing them. Because that destruction leads to better theories: still probably wrong, but at least not wrong where they were before. A corollary of this is that understanding is not, as was generally believed, "explaining the unknown by the known" so much as "explaining the known by the unknown": reaching towards bigger and better theories to explain things we (wrongly) think we understand. Science really advances when it experiences a paradigm shift: when we throw out the "received wisdom" of earlier generations for new and more exciting theories.
That's why I am interested in things like dowsing. There does seem to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that it "works"; but excitingly it doesn't fit our current theories of how things work. So we should either find out where it doesn't work (testing to destruction the understanding of the believers) or how we can incorporate it into a new theory of how things work (testing to destruction the understanding of the sceptic). (Or rather, the best approach will be a both-and, and hopefully done by both sides together.)
Tony (if you bother to read this) doesn't that strike you as a worthwhile thing to do?
Of course, meanwhile there will be awkward facts we don't understand but must live with: Heaviside said "Why should I refuse a good dinner simply because I don't understand the digestive processes involved?" Whether dowsing is a good dinner or not I simply don't know. But I think James Randi is unfair in the useful quote Steve gave us:
"Each dowser goes away from any trial of their powers, dismayed by their failure, puzzled at the reasons for the failure, but always capable of coming up with a reasonable to them excuse. That excuse may be any one of many. It may be an unfortunate arrangement of the planets, improper temperature or humidity, a problem of indigestion, too much ambient noise or too much silence or a poor attitude on the part of the observers". These might give us clues for useful areas of research: is noise/silence a factor, those of you who have dowsed? is there a model which could explain that? (Well, of course there are several; and those which try to explain the successes in terms of making conscious some unrealised knowledge might latch on to them; though they would probably discover that they are stretching what they originally meant by "knowledge".)
Sorry, for an OT post this has gone on far too long. But I'd still be interested in feedback. Thanks for listening.
Only if you want to do it. To some of us the why of many things isn't important. We accept them and don't feel the need to challenge what we experience (that includes a lot more than dowsing).
Or not hang a picture or not smell a flower (when the scent is incidental to human perception).
Quite.
That could also be expressed as, "Each *dowsing sceptic* goes away from any trial of their powers, dismayed by their failure, puzzled at the reasons for the failure, but always capable of coming up with a reasonable to them excuse."
I sometimes wonder why people who know everything bother coming on news groups and trying to prove people wrong when they could be saving the world :-)
But I don't spend much time on that wondering, there are more satisfying things to do. I don't understand them but Life's good and too short to waste.
The message from Douglas de Lacey contains these words:
I tend to be sceptical about most things but I have long had an open mind on dowsing or at least about the conventional sort, with a hazel twig or bent wires. Why? Firstly because there are loads of people who can get results at least some of the time (at at a probability well above random). Secondly because while it is currently unexplainable in scientific terms there is much we do not know for sure and dowsing is inherently no more unlikely than the ability of homing pigeons to home. Indeed dowsing might make use of much the same facility, tuning in to the local magnetic or gravitational field.
Now the caveats.
Dowsing by map just has to be pure bunkum. If the dowsers are not present on site they cannot interact with the local surroundings in any way at all.
That the bent wires are moved directly is likewise bunkum. They are moved either by involuntary muscle movements or deliberately. If they were moved directly then dowsing would work for everyone every time. Dowsing was traditionally done with a forked hazel twig which twisted upwards. ISTM that much the same muscle twitch could produce the dissimilar movements in the different tools so the modern approach with wires is actually following the long standing tradition.
As to why the Randi prize has yet to be won who knows. Perhaps Randi is just demanding too high a standard of proof. Even some commonplace things don't have a 100% success rate.
I have tried dowsing in the past and it just doesn't work for me but it doesn't need to be an ability that every one has for it to be real and if it is something as vague as a sense of direction then there is every reason to suppose it will be less than 100% successful. But a sense of direction, like dowsing, could be influenced entirely by subconscious signals from the local environment rather than local force fields. For me the jury is still out.
Err, that's your self-contradiction, not Popper's! Did you mean "that things are true"?
That's a bit of a travesty of Popper. You *can't* prove things (hypotheses) are true. You *can* prove them false (hence falsifiability) and thereby make better hypotheses.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't strike me as being worthwhile because I see absolutely no need to satisfy the doubters - it really isn't worth wasting my time on them. Whether people choose to believe in dowsing or not is entirely their concern.
I am not trying to defend it, nor to promote it, just to point out that it works well enough (for some people) to be quite widely accepted in several major industries as a practical aid to finding buried services. I started out as a sceptic. I'm still a sceptic! But dowsing worked very well for me, and that is all I need to know.
I accept that it works well for some people, and less well (or not at all) for others. But these numbers are probably small relative to the number of armchair "experts" who pontificate at length about dowsing yet have never tried it.
They will never be convinced, so why bother?
I would only be concerned if the idiots lobbied MPs to pass a law prohibiting what is a safe, surprisingly useful and minimally invasive technique for helping to find buried services.
If anyone ever discovers what makes it work, I suppose I would find it of mild interest, but that is all. There is a whole world out there with *myriads* of things that are *really* worth getting curious about. In my humble opinion, dowsing is not one of them.
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