Pseudoscience and Extraordinary Claims of the Paranormal - A Critical Thinker's

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Pseudoscience and Extraordinary Claims of the Paranormal - A Critical Thinker's toolkit - Dr. Jonathan C. Smith

I discovered this book and I think it's worth to mention it here due to the subject. I just take a look a it for the moment.

Here is the presentation of the author:

Dr. Jonathan C. Smith has written extensively on stress, relaxation, meditation, and mindfulness as well as spirituality and skepticism. He is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, Professor of Psychology at Chicago’s Roosevelt University, and Founding Director of the Roosevelt University Stress Institute. Dr. Smith has published 17 books with major international publishers and has authored more than three dozen articles. His innovative approaches to relaxation, meditation, and mindfulness have won wide professional acclaim. Dr. Smith has taught his approaches to thousands and has served as consultant for government, business, educational, medical, and health organizations around the world.

For nearly a half century, Dr. Smith has had an enduring and deep interest in teaching critical thinking and exploring the paranormal. His doctoral dissertation, completed at Michigan State University in 1975, was one of the first professionally acclaimed double-blind placebo studies on the then popular transcendental meditation (he found no therapeutic effect). This work led to three APA articles and his first two books. In 1984 he founded the Roosevelt University Stress Institute primarily to combat pseudoscience and quackery in the field. His manuals and textbooks on meditation, mindfulness, and spirituality take a distinctly skeptical perspective toward popular extraordinary claims often associated with these approaches. More recently he has written reviews of paranormal books for the American Psychological Association journal PsycCRITIQUES. In addition he has created classroom.

As he was dubed I don't know if all is really genuine so a critical eye is need but the toolkit is interesting. Here's how the book is structured:

PART I INTRODUCTION
1 The Continuum Mysteriosum
2 Why Study These Things?

PART II THE CRITICAL THINKER’S TOOLKIT

EVALUATE SUPPORT FOR A CLAIM
3 Reality Check: Are the Sources Credible?
4 Reality Check: Is the Logic Valid and Sound?
5 Reality Check: Are Claims Based on Observation (Scientific Tests and Theories)?

CONSIDER ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS
6 Reality Checking for Oddities of Nature and the World of Numbers
7 Reality Checking for Perceptual Error and Trickery
8 Reality Checking for Memory Errors
9 Reality Checking for the Placebo Effect
10 Reality Checking for Sensory Anomalies and Hallucinations

PART III THE PARANORMAL FILES
11 Spiritualism and the Survival Hypothesis
12 Parapsychology
13 Energy Treatments and Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)
14 Supernatural Cures and Faith Healing
15 Creationism, Intelligent Design, and God
16 The Reality Checkup: Using Your Toolkit

The part II is the interesting part. Tools for critical thinking. But when in the part III I read about acupuncture:

Must needles be inserted at precise acupuncture points? No. Poking just about anywhere works.

What!!??? The guy have never practised acupuncture for sure or misinform. So let's stop at part II with a genuine use.

 

[Mal7]

It sounds like the book takes a skeptical approach, in which case when reading it might be useful to take a skeptical approach to skeptical arguments. For example, is the skeptic using forms of argument that appeal to authoritarian followers? Or do they claim support for their skeptical case by appealing to processes that have been shown to be corrupted, like the peer review process?

 

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Exactly. And this is a good training to see how the "true" is bring to us.