Science and Psychic Phenomena: The Fall of the House of Skeptics by Chris Carter

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Contents

Provenance

What this document is

This is a book review — the subject of this page is the review itself, written by Etzel Cardeña, not the book by Chris Carter that it evaluates. The review assesses Carter’s book (abbreviated in the review as SPP), which Cardeña describes as “a strong critique of the critics of parapsychology.” The review opens with an epigraph attributed to a June 9 letter from Anton Chekhov to Scheglov and an extended framing device: the burning of Giordano Bruno, whose monument by Ferrari the reviewer encountered in Rome’s Campo dè Fiori. Cardeña quotes a report (Seife 2000) that in the year 2000 Cardinal Sodano remarked that Bruno’s inquisitors “had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.”

The stakes, as the review frames them, are whether dogmatic and censorious impulses persist within science itself. Before turning to the book, Cardeña presents three examples: (1) physicists Valentini and Towler initially disinviting Brian Josephson (identified as a Nobel prize-winner) and David Peat from a conference on David Bohm’s work because of their interest in parapsychology and synchronicity, even though Bohm himself discussed parapsychology favorably; (2) reactions to Bem (2011), a peer-reviewed precognition paper, including New York Times opinion pieces by Douglas Hofstadter and David Helfand — the latter calling its publication “an assault on rationality” — and a critique by Wagenmakers et al. (2011) asserting that Bem’s results “conflict(s) with what we know is true about the world”; and (3) the reviewer’s own experience at Lund University, where more than 10 professors, none with training in parapsychology or even psychology as far as he could tell, protested a magazine story about his controlled telepathy experiment, and the Chalmers Institute in Gothenburg later held an event discussing whether such research is an innocent game or a dangerous parasite.

What the review covers

The review notes bibliographic history the book’s cover omits: it was originally published in 2007 as Parapsychology and the Skeptics: A Scientific Argument for the Existence of ESP, and the 2012 version, except for minor changes, has not been updated. The retitling, with its allusion to Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, is not explained by Carter; Cardeña calls equating the critics’ perspective to a Gothic nightmare “wildly overdriven.”

As Cardeña characterizes it, the book first catalogs pronouncements by eminent scientists showing prejudice trumping enquiry, then compares statements by critics of parapsychology with the evidence from psi research. The reviewer singles out the historical chapters tracing arguments and counterarguments between researchers and critics — particularly the ganzfeld debate section, which describes the joint collaboration of psi researcher Charles Honorton and psi critic Ray Hyman on a paper addressing methodological weaknesses of the ganzfeld (homogeneous sensory stimulation) research model. Per the review, studies after those improvements have continued to find evidence for psi (citing Storm, Tressoldi, & Di Risio 2010a), while Hyman and others have provided tendentious critiques or failed to discuss accumulated evidence (citing Storm, Tressoldi, & Di Risio 2010b). Cardeña adds that Carter shows critics have at times misrepresented their own research when it favored the psi hypothesis, and notes that Carter (2010) is “strangely not mentioned in the book.”

The review also treats the book’s philosophy-of-science discussion, which relies mostly on Karl Popper’s view of science as conjectural rather than definitive; Cardeña calls this an antidote to dogmatic, authoritarian stances, while finding Carter’s handling of other topics less sure-footed. The review closes by situating SPP among other recent books scrutinizing career debunkers: Randi’s Prize (McLuhan 2010), described as covering a greater although less-focused scope, and The Heretics (Storr 2013), which discusses debunkers within a larger context of why people engage in irrational beliefs. Cardeña also invokes Carl Sagan’s phrase about scientists failing to do “the necessary homework” (Sagan 1976:2).

The reviewer’s assessments: strengths and weaknesses identified

As a review, this document reports evaluations rather than experimental figures. The table below summarizes the assessments the reviewer states, attributed throughout to Cardeña.

Aspect of the bookReviewer’s stated assessment
Historical chapters on researcher–critic exchanges (e.g., ganzfeld debate)Where the book “is at its best”; documents how critics misrepresented parapsychology research
Philosophy of science (Popperian) discussionAn antidote to dogmatic, authoritarian scientific stances
Technical accuracyOdd definitions noted — dendrites as “electric tentacles,” neurotransmitters as “drugs” (p. 229); a “very broad brush” across psychology, physics, history of ideas, philosophy of science, and parapsychology
Treatment of NewtonNot completely fair to regard Newton only within determinism while ignoring his mystical perspective (cf. Bakan 1973)
BalanceMostly mute on weaknesses of parapsychological research (e.g., little programmatic or integrative research) and on puzzling features of the data such as the decline effect — which, per Schooler (2011), is not confined to psi research
Currency of informationThe “biggest weakness”: much information is dated; frequent references to Helmut Schmidt as still working on micro-psychokinesis although he died in 2011 and had stopped working in the field years earlier; recent meta-analyses and studies not covered — the book is more an account of the field from the early 2000s
DocumentationFails to provide references for apparent factual statements or even quotations, e.g., from the Report of the Experiments on Animal Magnetism (Colquhoun, cited in-text as 1833:2)

What the document itself concludes

Cardeña concludes that despite its limitations, SPP “brings attention to unfair and often unscientific practices by some critics of parapsychology” and to evidence that “the same impulse that had the inquisitors gag Giordano Bruno is very much alive in our day, even though the iron spikes have been retired.” The review’s broader argument is that some self-described “skeptics” disregard the scientific method, rarely conduct empirical studies to test their alternative explanations, and pontificate about areas they have not studied systematically. At the same time, the reviewer explicitly registers his caveats: the book’s title metaphor is overdriven, its information is dated, its coverage is uneven, and it neglects genuine weaknesses in parapsychological research. These evaluations are the reviewer’s own, stated in the document.

Document-integrity notes

References cited in the document

Last updated: 2026-08-12 02:28:57

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