Madeline
Rookie
- Banned
- #1
There are many reasons for the popularity of paranormal beliefs in the United States today, including:
* the irresponsibility of the mass media, who exploit the public taste for nonsense,
* the irrationality of the American world-view, which supports such unsupportable claims as life after death and the efficacy of the polygraph, (Whoops...I did think polygraphs had some validity) and
* the ineffectiveness of public education, which generally fails to teach students the essential skills of critical thinking.
As a college professor, I am especially concerned with this third problem. Most of the freshman and sophomore students in my classes simply do not know how to draw reasonable conclusions from the evidence. At most, they've been taught in high school what to think; few of them know how to think.
In an attempt to remedy this problem at my college, I've developed an elective course called “Anthropology and the Paranormal.” The course examines the complete range of paranormal beliefs in contemporary American culture, from precognition and psychokinesis to channeling and cryptozoology and everything between and beyond, including astrology, UFOs, and creationism.
I teach the students very little about anthropological theories and even less about anthropological terminology. Instead, I try to communicate the essence of the anthropological perspective, by teaching them, indirectly, what the scientific method is all about. I do so by teaching them how to evaluate evidence. I give them six simple rules to follow when considering any claim, and then show them how to apply those six rules to the examination of any paranormal claim.
The six rules of evidential reasoning are my own distillation and simplification of the scientific method.
To make it easier for students to remember these half-dozen guidelines, I've coined an acronym for them: Ignoring the vowels, the letters in the word ”FiLCHeRS” stand for the rules of Falsifiability, Logic, Comprehensiveness, Honesty, Replicability, and Sufficiency. Apply these six rules to the evidence offered for any claim, I tell my students, and no one will ever be able to sneak up on you and steal your belief.
You'll be filch-proof.
CSI | A Field Guide to Critical Thinking
Any thoughts, folks?
Me, I liked his "Falsifiability" tenet. It had not occurred to me before but seems true: any belief that is never going to be susceptable to being proven false has to be considered magical thinking or religious belief, not "fact".