Facts and Opinions
My father used to say, somewhat facetiously, that he had made his mind up and he wasn't going to be influenced by facts. The Sceptics society (there's a few of them around the world), have a similar saying: "extreme claims require extreme proof". What they mean by this is that if something appears to contradict accepted scientific theories than it must be subject to a higher degree of scrutiny.
There are a number of fallacies in this. First is the assumption that these
'claims' contradict accepted scientific theories, which is rarely the case.
If someone believes in ghosts than this doesn't contradict any existing scientific
laws. Einstein's general theory of relativity says, among other things, that
the combined speed of two objects approaching each other is not the sum of the
two speeds. For example, if I observe a car going at 50kph down a road and a
car traveling in the opposite direction at 50kph then from Newton's theory of
gravity, I would guess that their speed on impact would 100kph. It would, or
so close that any difference would be undetectable. However, two rockets approaching
each other both traveling at 150,000 kps (kilometres per second) will not hit
each other with a combined speed of 300,000 kps, the actual speed will be less.
This doesn't mean that Newton was wrong, or that common sense should be thrown
away, it simply means that Newton's theory was a special case that applies at
relatively low speeds. Similarly, many ideas which sceptics say contradict established
theories (these 'extreme claims') don't.
Another, rather trivial example, is this. Imagine we are performing experiments to determine the boiling point of water. We get a number of people in different situations to bring water to the boil and to determine the temperature. Most determine that it boils at 100C (leaving aside, for the time being, that 100C was defined as the boiling point of water). However there are two exceptions. One finds the water boils at above 100C and the other below it. So do we simply dismiss these as being 'exceptional claims'? A good scientist (not that there's many of these left) would attempt to determine why these differences occur. He may find, for instance, that the one that boiled below 100C was at an altitude and the one that boiled above 100C was slightly salty. The problem is to do these experiments means having an understanding of what you are studying. It also means taking the claims seriously.
Deepak Chopra in one of his books talks about a clinic that he helped set up to teach meditation as a method of treating incurable cancer. Some scientists came to examine whether the treatment was effective. To cut a long story short, the method they used to determine whether the people were actually meditating was to ask them. Deepak Chopra found, however, that many people who claimed to meditate did not, in the sense that they did not still the mind. Because the scientists didn't understand what they were studying (and probably didn't take the claims seriously enough to care), they didn't perform a proper scientific investigation. Sceptics find what hey want to find.
