Controversy and the problems of parapsychology

Accounts are not directly given by nature but may be approached as the products of social processes and negotiations that mediate scientists' accounts of the natural world. The study of ... controversies have the further advantage that these social processes, which ordinarily are not visible to outsiders, are confronted and made overt by the contending disputants. (p. 512)

What could be more important to us than the uncovering of confounding variables? How can we expect to control for, or even eliminate, confounds if we refuse to admit they exist?

The Principle of Symmetry. This brings me to the principle of symmetry. For most of the history of the constructivist approach, both the Edinburgh School and the Bath School have applied what is known as the principle of symmetry; that is, the methodology adopted in their brand of science studies required that scientific knowledge claims made by each side in a controversy needed to be balanced in the analysis (Bloor, 1976/1991). In the study of scientific controversy, those who conformed to the orthodox scientific worldview were not to be privileged over those who dissented. Beginning in the 1970s, Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch, and others conducted a number of important studies of parapsychological research using this approach (Collins & Pinch, 1979, 1982). We and other dissenters whose scientific production were studied in this way benefited from the principle of symmetry because our knowledge claims were taken as seriously as were those of the orthodox view (a happy by-product of the principle of symmetry), or, once our knowledge claims were bracketed or set aside with the knowledge claims of the orthodox community as beyond the scope of the analysis, the structure of our enterprise was analyzed as though we were not working beyond the margins of the mainstream--again, a happy by-product that, we thought, allowed us to be seen as we ourselves see us, as "real" scientists and not as pseudo- or marginal scientists.

Recently, there has been a certain amount of backlash in the science studies community against the principle of symmetry (Scott, Richards, & Martin, 1990). Main journals in the field, such as Social Studies of Science, have published discussions about the importance of the cognitive content of scientific work and about the necessity of enlisting and acknowledging scientific expertise when analyzing controversy (Collins, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c; Edge, 1999; Koertge, 1999; MacKenzie, 1999a, 1999b). In my reading of these discussions, I see a connection between this concern about scientific content in general and the fact that parapsychology was given what we have always thought was a "fair" reading, particularly in the work of Collins and Pinch (1979, 1982). Perhaps for some science analysts, symmetry was fine as long as the controversy studied took place within the boundaries of orthodox science and not across the divide between "us" and "them." Even Collins and Pinch have noted in their recent books, The Golem: W hat You Should Know About Science (1993/1998a) and The Golem at Large: What You Should Know About Technology (1998b), that the principle of symmetry seems to have served, in effect, to aid the enemy, that is, to bolster the status and persuasiveness of those whose lines of research were labeled by orthodox sciences as failed or erroneous.