Scientific Anomalies and How the Mind Manages Them
Date: Saturday, October 04, 2008 @ 23:37:51 UTC Topic: Science
Excerpts from the Keynote Address For Festschrift in Honor of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Lab’s Twentieth Anniversary -- By Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Ph.D.
... PEAR’s work hasn’t
had an altogether easy reception in some of the quarters which house
mainstream science. That’s no surprise to anybody who makes a business
of scientific anomalies. Anomalies don’t invite widespread acceptance
until they’ve stopped being anomalous. That’s normal science and it’s
old news.
But I want today to suggest that just because it’s old
news doesn’t mean it’s not worth a fresh look as interesting news. A
fresh look that turns it into interesting news may do us the particular
favor of enabling us to move beyond all those tired arguments over
whether or not work like that being done at PEAR belongs in the
register of what mainstream science likes to call science. Those are by
now very tired arguments. As arguments they’re boring. They rarely
convince anyone of anything and worse, they have a peculiarly draining
quality which usually leads me to feel with Melville’s Bartelby the
Scrivener that, invited to engage, I Prefer Not.
So I’m
suggesting we abandon the argument strategy and go a different route.
Not argument. Nor its frequent alternative: pessimistic retreat. I’m
suggesting we mobilize our respective capacities for finding things
interesting and maximally engage the problem of how the scientific mind
manages anomalies as a frankly fascinating phenomenon. I think the
pay-off may be considerable. We may learn some useful things about the
human mind. We may learn some useful things about how to communicate
with colleagues. We may even learn a thing or two about the nature of
the anomalies which lie at the heart of what occupies some of us.
Now
at this point it’s only fair to back up and tell you I’m a
psychoanalyst. Worse – a few other respectable credentials
notwithstanding – I’m an old-fashioned, Freudian-trained psychoanalyst
who hasn’t seen fit to recant. I haven’t recanted because, once the
mountains of chaff have been lifted from what’s accumulated as the body
of psychoanalytic knowledge, there remain a few key truths which
function – I find – as remarkably powerful tools for understanding a
number of things about people. Especially relevant for the question of
why, in considering work like PEAR’s, normally open-minded scientists
sometimes display astonishing defiance of the open-mindedness to which
they’re in principle devoted: psychoanalytic thinking nourishes an
ineluctable fascination with why people resist certain ideas and
experiences in ways that are not only tenacious but in ways that at
times run directly counter to their own interests. People resist
all kinds of things as if their lives depended on it. But there’s an
intriguing irony. It’s often precisely the things people most
vigorously resist which stand a chance at turning them into happier
people. It’s the patent self-destructiveness of the ways they resist
which is so impressive. When people recognize the self-destructiveness
of their resistances, it's remarkable how often and how quickly they
find ways to give them up. Helping them get to the point where they
choose to do that is the challenge which psychoanalysis has made a fine
art of exploring. ...
Read this whole fascinating discourse in our "Special Sections/Editor's Picks": http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=24
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