D.J. Grothe’s lecture from NECSS 2010 has made the leap to the interwebz, and you may view it below.
D.J.’s subject, “Skepticism Is a Humanism,” is an affirmation of a principle that some of us think goes without saying, and which the rest of us hardly think about. It raises some interesting questions.
The talk begins with definitions. D.J. asks: Is skepticism “saying no to nonsensical beliefs”? I don’t think so. The pejorative “nonsense” almost automatically implies a degree of solipsism; an unwarranted trust in one’s ability to distinguish nonsense from truth. Everybody, Tom Cruise to Fred Phelps, thinks s/he says “no” to nonsense. It doesn’t make them skeptical. (Though it does reveal an innate, unformed inclination toward skepticism, which makes me hopeful.) A meaningful definition of skepticism would have to encapsulate the process by which we identify nonsense, rather than note the mere fact that we disparage it.
Another definition D.J. proffers is “ordinary common sense.” This isn’t any better, and may be worse, as it rips “ordinary” and “common” from their ordinary, common definitions. Skepticism is neither. It is an historical and cultural rarity.
Ultimately, D.J. settles on a simpler and more dynamic definition: Skepticism is a “method of finding things out” that is consonant with “the methods of science.” This is inarguable, and I like it. I especially like it because to accept it is to quietly acknowledge that skepticism‘s primary business isn‘t investigating “things that go bump in the night,” as D.J. calls them. Its jurisdiction isn’t the paranormal: It’s the universe.
NECSS 2010 - Keynote - D. J. Grothe from Maggie McFee on Vimeo.
As D.J. says repeatedly in his talk, it is not the JREF’s business to apply skepticism to economic theories, literary criticism, the merits of pop music, the ethics of diamond mining, or French cooking. (Or Global Warming.) Those are worthy pursuits, but they are not ours. We operate in the field of extraordinary claims, where deceptions tend toward the dramatic, and where there is a thick line separating truth from bullpocky. Ours is a tiny slice of skepticism.
Why should we so limit ourselves? The question isn’t central to D.J.’s talk, but I think it’s one worth asking. The best answer I can come up with is “practice.”
The JREF’s targets are almost always blatantly, inarguably wrong. With a very few exceptions, their claims fall apart upon even cursory examination. And yet their audiences — those who truly feel they have a friend in Sylvia Browne, Kevin Trudeau, Rhonda Byrne — believe them wholeheartedly. The JREF’s tiny slice of skepticism, therefore, is the place where we may witness deceit at its wacky extreme; where we may study its methods and catalogue its weapons. If we know them, and if we understand them, we may begin to note how the faulty reasoning that ensures John Edward an audience can infect, or at least inflect, a novel or a political speech; how it can spin an election or sabotage a philosophy. Deception has only a very few signatures. In the paranormal, they are always writ large.