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Merged Was the medium Leonora Piper credible?

daan_e

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Hi everyone,

I'm reading Deborah Blum's book Ghost Hunters, William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death, in which she mentions various seemingly miraculous incidents with the medium Leonora Piper. These passages are dismissed in the New York Times book review with reference to a skeptical article on Piper by Martin Gardner.

But then I found an extremely fairminded and well-informed piece on Gardner's dismissal of Piper as a fraud, which you can read when you search for 'On Martin Gardner Skeptical Concepts' on google (first entry in my case).

What is your opinion of this piece? It (and the book by Blum) made me think that if some of the reports by the British Society for Psychical Research of Piper's pronouncements are accurate, she is a hard case to crack. I'm very interested in hearing your opinion.

Best wishes,
Daan
Please do not start multiple copies of the same thread.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Cuddles
 
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Hi everyone,

I'm reading Deborah Blum's book Ghost Hunters, William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death, in which she mentions various seemingly miraculous incidents with the medium Leonora Piper. These passages are dismissed in the New York Times book review with reference to a skeptical article on Piper by Martin Gardner.

But then I found an extremely fairminded and well-informed piece on Gardner's dismissal of Piper as a fraud, which you can read when you search for 'On Martin Gardner Skeptical Concepts' on google (first entry in my case).

What is your opinion of this piece? It (and the book by Blum) made me think that if some of the reports by the British Society for Psychical Research of Piper's pronouncements are accurate, she is a hard case to crack. I'm very interested in hearing your opinion.

Best wishes,
Daan
 
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The absolute absence of objective evidence supporting anything paranormal, in the entirety of recorded history, makes Mr. Gardener's dismissive presumptions of anything paranormal actually existing seem perfectly reasonable to me.

YMMV
 
In a way, that seems right. But why aren't the extensive reports on her trances by people who were at least trying to take every precaution (such as Hodgson, who was very skeptical) the kind of evidence you say does not exist?

Best wishes,
Daan
 
The kind of evidence that is required, and which does not exist, is that resulting from properly controlled and blinded experiments. Were such experiments done with Leonara Piper? I see no mention of any in her wiki article, just the usual anecdotal observations for which cold and hot reading, the Forer Effect etc are adequate explanations.
 
Click here for the article in question:

I didn't read it all because after a while I started to realise that Greg Taylor (the writer of the article) wasn't actually going to present any actual evidence that Gardner's conclusion was wrong. Questioning the point of view and methods of the critic does not make the claim he criticised any more true.

You say you found the article to be "extremely fairminded and well-informed" but Greg Taylor is quite outspoken in his criticism of sceptics and I have found his writing to be not fairminded at all.

But then here I am criticising the criticism of the critic, and that gets no one anywhere.

So, if you think that Piper could actually communicate with the dead, perhaps the first (or the only) thing you can do is present some evidence that she ever did.
That would be a way forward instead of posting about an article criticising someone's point of view, cited in relation to a review of a book. :)
 
Never heard of her. If she were legit, we all would have.
 
daan_e said:
In a way, that seems right. But why aren't the extensive reports on her trances by people who were at least trying to take every precaution (such as Hodgson, who was very skeptical) the kind of evidence you say does not exist?

Best wishes,
Daan
Click to expand...

nope
 
At pixel42: if your read the article by Taylor and know something about the British Society for Psychical Research one cannot simply say they did not control the experiments properly.

At Straycat: Taylor presents detailed criticisms of Gardner, so I would keep on reading.

Of course I agree with all of you that there is an extremely strong presumption against genuine mediumship, which is why I was surprised to read about the work done on Piper by pretty decent researchers who could not explain her results.
 
Was the medium Leonora Piper credible?

No - as noted by daffyd there is not any such thing as a credible medium. By default (of their faking, preying on the deluded and unhappy, giving false hope and all the other ill they bring their victims) a medium is only credible as a slime coated, foul, disgusting mercenary thing - beneath human contempt.


Hope this helps!!:):)
 
daan_e said:
Of course I agree with all of you that there is an extremely strong presumption against genuine mediumship, which is why I was surprised to read about the work done on Piper by pretty decent researchers who could not explain her results.
Click to expand...

Once again, unexplained doesn't mean unexplainable.
 
daan_e said:
Of course I agree with all of you that there is an extremely strong presumption against genuine mediumship, which is why I was surprised to read about the work done on Piper by pretty decent researchers who could not explain her results.
Click to expand...

It's not contingent upon these researchers to explain anything, though. For evidence to amount to anything, it should be consistent, unambiguous, available, and corroborated. This is why extraordinary stories, even if offered by famous people, most often amount to nothing.

What we have in this case are some raised Victorian eyebrows. So what?

What we don't have is anything to work with.

If there is an afterlife, someone needs to establish it, which as I suggested above, means strong evidence that is consistent, unambiguous, available, and corroborated.

Nothing less will do.
 
daan_e said:
In a way, that seems right. But why aren't the extensive reports on her trances by people who were at least trying to take every precaution (such as Hodgson, who was very skeptical) the kind of evidence you say does not exist?

Best wishes,
Daan
Click to expand...

How does one tell the difference between entrancement and play-acting?

How does one tell the difference between prior knowledge and mystic revelations?
 
Apparently, there are 500 pages of detailed investigations in the archives of the SPR (which I haven't read, admittedly). They made it their goal to rule out fraud, and were aware of everything from the ideomotor effect to cold-reading. So it is a bit quick to say we don't have anything to work with, in my opinion.
 
daan_e said:
At pixel42: if your read the article by Taylor and know something about the British Society for Psychical Research one cannot simply say they did not control the experiments properly.
Click to expand...
I have read the article, and I certainly can say that. There is no indication whatsoever that any properly controlled and blinded experiments were done. They just did their best to ensure that she had no way of obtaining information about her subjects, and then used their own judgment to decide that her hits were more numerous and accurate than would be expected by chance.

This thread contains an example of the sort of test protocol which is necessary for testing claims like Piper's:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=118952

Nothing like it was done.

Bear in mind that simply knowing what cold reading, confirmation bias and subjective validation are doesn't make you immune to them. They must still be rigorously excluded by the test protocol.
 
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Well, I guess I can't ask anyone to read the original sources, as I don't even know how to get my hands on them myself.

What is clear is that the SPR did things like the following: they sent sitters who remained anonymous to the medium with pieces of hair from persons they did not even know themselves (upon which the medium supposedly identified a great many people in the family of this person correctly); they wore headmasks to disguise facial expressions, sat behind the medium, refused to respond to questions, checked that the trance was real by inserting needles which would ordinarily induce pain (to which the medium did not respond), etc.

Still, the fact that we can't check the exact experimental set-up is problematic. I certainly hope you are right that even Piper was a fraud, since what we know about the world seems to make mediumship very unlikely.

But I also think some members of the SPR deserve credit for their attempts to find out if she was a fraud, even if they failed!

Thanks for your comments.
 
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Everything they did was fine, and they certainly deserve credit for it. But it wasn't enough, as they still used their own judgement to decide whether the number and accuracy of the hits were more than would be expected by chance. Cognitive biases make everyone's judgement of such things suspect which is why it is necessary to blind such tests, so that the chance result is known beforehand, a success criteria significantly better than that can be decided beforehand, and the actual result can be compared to it.

Given the amount of detail of the test protocol that is provided, I'm sure that if the vital step of blinding had been included it would have been mentioned. So I think it's safe to conclude that the tests were not blinded, and the results are therefore worthless.
 
Thanks, your points about their intuitive assessment of the significance of the hits have persuaded me there is a deep problem with the research.

I would still like to take a look at the original sources some time. It may be possible to check the significance of the hits in retrospect (depending on the details of their reports; but they are apparently quite detailed). Or is there some reason why this is not possible even if we have that information?
 
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