Reflexivity and the Trickster

The result and the sense of the fraud is … not that it simulates, but that it masks, the genuine phenomena.

Kurt Godel, referring to the paranormal

Reflexivity is one of the most abstract concepts presented in this book, and it is a frequent source of paradox and confusion. The concept is not difficult, but it often seems so, and because of that, few have recognized its generality. Common patterns can be seen in diverse areas when one understands properties of reflexive operations. Mathematical logic, literary theory, ethnomethodology, meditation, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and postmodernism carry examples of reflexivity, and they show some surprising commonalities.

The ideas of reflexivity, mirroring, reflection, self-reference, and projection are interrelated. Though some of these terms are often used interchangeably, it can be helpful to make distinctions. Self-reference is the source of a number of paradoxes. One of the best known is: “This statement is false” (Epimenides’ paradox); the sentence refers to itself, and, if it is false, then it’s true. On the surface, this seems trivial or even silly, but the consequences are profound. This paradox confuses subject and object; it explodes that distinction. Reflection is a slightly different idea; when one is reflective, one is aware of oneself. Being reflexive is a further step—one is aware of one’s awareness. Reflexivity is the turning of some function or process back upon itself, as in using awareness to learn about awareness or using logic to study logic.

At first glance, reflexivity appears innocuous, but as it is pondered, scholars often become vaguely apprehensive. When restricted to mathematical logic or literary theory, the feelings are typically muted, but when consideration moves to concrete matters, researchers often encounter manifestations that are more ominous and then turn away.

Sociologists have offered some of the most intriguing comments. Bruno Latour warns that “Given the pressure of a scientific career, reflexivity is equivalent to suicide.” Hugh Mehan and Houston Wood note that: “The reflexivity of reflexivity lies behind Garfinkel’s … statement that … Ethnomethodology is only ‘for whoever has the nervous system to withstand it … for whoever can take it’.” Sociologists have recognized reflexivity to be dangerous, a way to make trouble, something to be avoided, and Malcolm Ashmore’s book The Reflexive Thesis (1989) contains a substantial listing of quotes supporting this point. He also listed some of the names for the problem of reflexivity: “the abyss, the spectre, the infinite regress; paradox, aporia, antinomy.” These evoke the numinous.

Barbara Babcock, the preeminent theorist of the trickster, has written a number of papers dealing with reflexivity; in fact it was the topic of her doctoral dissertation. She noted that it is not a new idea, and numerous variants have been presented in many contexts. She points out that: “Reflexivity is a problematic concept, a paradoxical concept, and as Wittgenstein says, ‘a concept with blurred edges’.” It necessarily leads to some ambiguity. Babcock is one of the very few who has understood its connection to liminality. The “blurred edges” she cites is only one brief allusion, and she has significantly developed other facets of the issue.

Manifestations of reflexivity frequently have some paranormal or mystical aspect in the milieu. It may emerge as something of a side issue or seem totally unrelated, but this frequent association indicates a fundamental connection. The lives of the people involved sometimes show this. As such, there will be an extended discussion of one person in whom reflexivity, paradox and the paranormal converge, namely Martin Gardner.

Although reflexivity has at times been topical in intellectual culture, almost nothing has been written on it in regard to parapsychology. The current ways of thinking in that field do not easily lend themselves to considering reflexivity or seeing its importance. Yet telepathy blurs the distinction between self and other (subject and object) and raises the question: “Who’s thoughts am I thinking?” (a paranoiac query). Our society promotes rationality and leads us to view ourselves as discrete, independent entities. Psi challenges that idea by subverting the distinction between subject and object. Psi is intrinsically paradoxical, and paradox models are needed in conceptualizing psi phenomena; reflexive models provide them.

Sociology

Reflexivity is difficult to study directly. A more fruitful approach is to investigate its consequences by examining the social and intellectual environments where it is confronted. A few sociologists advised this tack, and Malcolm Ashmore quotes Steven Yearley saying “What I think is interesting about reflexivity is the way people evade the implications of the paradox, and I think it’s other people’s evasion that is interesting and instructive rather than that we should create an experience out of facing the anxiety itself. So why I seem to run down reflexivity is because with these paradoxes my feeling is that the best thing to do is not to confront them.” Ashmore also quotes Trevor Pinch warning him that reflexivity “presents peculiar ‘political’ problems since the audience for your work will be the people you study. Be warned—you are bound to make an enemy of everyone!” This counsel is useful; however, I do not intend to fully follow Yearley and Pinch. I expect to antagonize people. I will accept Yearley’s advice to notice where reflexivity erupts, and observe how it is handled, alluded to, and avoided.

The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and ethnomethodology are two branches of sociology that have considered reflexivity at some length. The germane writings from those fields are especially valuable because they deal with reflexivity in real-world situations and not just in terms of abstract logic or in literary texts. This has enormous repercussions, including how ethnomethodology is conducted today.

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology was founded by Harold Garfinkel, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. In its early years in the 1960s, ethnomethodology was quite radical, and many sociologists disavowed it. Since then, it has been tamed; its fundamental challenges have been largely repressed by sociology’s collective memory, and ethnomethodology is now incorporated into the establishment, with introductory college texts devoting at least some space to it. Its roots can be traced to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Though ethnomethodology shows little overlap with semiotics or structuralism in its intellectual predecessors or in its personnel, there are remarkable similarities in the salient issues.

Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) is one of the classic works of the field. It is egregiously written. In fact, anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace commented that “In some passages, normal English grammar is almost completely abandoned” and “Where one expects clear technical exposition, one finds instead the creative ambiguity of a prophet exhorting his followers and confounding the heathen.” He suggests that it should be “read not as technical prose but inspirational literature.” Fortunately, The Reality of Ethnomethodology (1975) by Hugh Mehan and Houston Wood is much more accessible, and it provides a sophisticated discussion with many concrete examples. Their book addresses a multitude of issues including reflexivity and paranoia.

Ethnomethodologists took as their subject matter the interactions of everyday social life and how people make sense of them. That sounds innocuous enough, but ethnomethodologists probed foundations. They recognized that for orderly common activity, people must share a large body of assumptions, meanings, and expectations, though these are not consciously recognized. In order to make them explicit (i.e., bring them to conscious awareness), breaching experiments were invented, and those involved violating, in some way, typical patterns of behavior. For instance students might be given an assignment to return home and act as though they were boarders (e.g., being very polite, using formal address, and not showing undue familiarity), and later record their reactions and those of their family. These exercises often caused parents and siblings to become angry and upset.

Garfinkel was explicit about his aims. He said “Procedurally it is my preference to start with familiar scenes and ask what can be done to make trouble.” He stated that it was his intention to provoke “bewilderment, consternation, and confusion; to produce the socially structured affects of anxiety, shame, guilt, and indignation; and to produce disorganized interaction should tell us something about how the structures of everyday activities are ordinarily and routinely produced and maintained.” These breaching experiments have commonalities with anti-structure and the trickster; they all violate the boundaries that frame experience.

Another ethnomethodology exercise was to have students record a brief, everyday conversation (maybe only 5 or ten sentences long) and prepare a transcription of it on the left-hand half of a sheet of paper. On the right half of the sheet, they would proceed to explain it, and in doing so they often came to realize that the conversation was nearly unintelligible to outsiders. Their explanations were typically much longer than the original conversation. The next step was to have them explain the explanation. The students would soon recognize that this could become an infinite process, demonstrating the impossibility of specifying all aspects required for complete understanding. This could be applied to any communication, and as Mehan and Wood put it: “all symbolic forms (rules, linguistic utterances, gestures, actions) carry a fringe of incompleteness.”

These kinds of experiments and demonstrations led ethnomethodologists to explore issues of abstraction, reflexivity, and participation (i.e., becoming part of the phenomenon). I will describe some of them, but the reader should be aware that today summaries of ethnomethodology often give them little or no notice. The topics proved too subversive. In fact several recent reviews note that analysis of conversations is now the major part of ethnomethodology. That keeps it safe by restricting it to text so that it cannot wreak havoc in the outer world.

Ethnomethodology applied to sociology (i.e., reflexively) was not always flattering or welcome, especially when the incompleteness of sociology’s assumptions was pointed out. These challenges irritated other sociologists. Mehan and Wood report: “Ethnomethodology investigates everyday life. Social science colleagues sometimes ask me to tell them about ethnomethodology. I have developed presentations using videotapes of everyday scenes. I find that sociologists have had little experience at such observations. This incompetence is remarkable … They have no interest in the scenes themselves. It is only when they are discussing abstracted concepts that they feel secure. I am often made to feel as if I have breached some deep taboo by even suggesting that the problem of social order is related to everyday interactions.”

Mehan and Wood note that “because alone among the sciences it treats meaning itself as a phenomenon, ethnomethodology exhibits several novel characteristics.” Meaning is a concern shared by literary theory, and as I will explain later, it is one that scientists avoid.

Ethnomethodologists pointed out that one is part of that which one observes, i.e., one participates in processes of observation. The issue of participation has some intriguing connections. At least since Levy Bruhl’s How Natives Think (1910) it has been associated with the nonrational. Mehan and Wood mentioned an article by Edmund Leach reviewing an anthology containing several papers critical of contemporary practices in anthropology. In that review, Leach spent some space discussing the issue of participation, one that ethnographers necessarily face. He commented: “But God forbid that we should propose the search for mystical experience as a proper substitute for the pretensions of objectivity. I have no wish to muddle up my scholarly concerns with the ethics of a Franciscan friar.” As he typically does, Leach strikes at the heart of the matter with sparkling, unexpected comparisons. The references to mystical experience and a Franciscan friar are altogether appropriate. Mysticism subverts subjective and objective, and friars are permanently liminal persons. Reflexivity entails participation and raises the issue of the irrational.

Mehan and Wood say that their theoretical perspective “within ethnomethodology commits me to the study of concrete scenes and to the recognition that I am always a part of those scenes. Social science is committed to avoiding both of those involvements.”15 They are correct, but few social scientists wish to acknowledge the consequences. The abstraction and distancing found in all science endow a certain status and privilege from which to judge and comment on others. In order to maintain that position, scientists must not get too “dirty,” too closely associated with their objects of study. Ethnomethodologists understand that they necessarily participate in the phenomena they observe. Mehan and Wood comment that “Ethnomethodology can be seen as an activity of destratification.” This destratification is a leveling of status, and that is also associated with liminal conditions (a.k.a., anti-structure). Thus social leveling via participation and reflexivity has been recognized by theorists from entirely separate disciplines, demonstrating its validity. As I will show shortly, this same issue of status leveling irrupts in the sociology of scientific knowledge.

As befits those who deal with reflexivity, ethnomethodologists have had some amusing encounters with tricksters. Garfinkel was one of the faculty members who approved Carlos Castaneda’s Ph.D. dissertation. But this was not the only instance of his being duped in the course of his professional work.

The longest chapter in Studies in Ethnomethodology was devoted to “Agnes” who was born a boy. At puberty he developed no facial hair, and his breasts began to enlarge. Garfinkel became interested for theoretical reasons. He hypothesized that a person strives to develop a clearly defined sex role because that is what others expect, and by conforming to those expectations, social life becomes easier. Garfinkel spent time interviewing Agnes in order to illuminate that process. Agnes then underwent surgery to remove her penis and become a woman.

The medical doctors and Garfinkel believed that the condition was congenital, but unbeknownst to them, the boy had regularly stolen Stilbestrol from his mother, and taken it for years. His gender ambiguity was intentionally induced. Agnes had chosen to be sexually ambiguous for years. All this was discovered after Garfinkel wrote his book, and it falsified his hypothesis in a very embarrassing way.

Mehan and Wood’s The Reality of Ethnomethodology is not completely free from gullibility either. It favorably cites Castaneda and another hoax-like work, Keep the River on Your Right by Tobias Schneebaum. Schneebaum told a story of Akarama tribesmen in South American engaging in homosexual activity and cannibalism, which anthropologists knew were not part of their tradition. In any event, Schneebaum dropped strong hints that the book should not be taken as fully factual, and Mehan and Wood should have recognized them, but they didn’t. Richard de Mille revealed the embarrassing mistake in his highly entertaining and instructive anthology The Don Juan Papers (1980). He showed Schneebaum’s account was largely fantasy, and he also included a statement by Schneebaum, essentially admitting as much. Despite such slips by Mehan and Wood, I highly recommend their volume, though I suggest reading in it conjunction with de Mille’s.

These three embarrassments for ethnomethodology—”Agnes,” Schneebaum, and Castaneda—have clear trickster and liminal elements. The Anges and Schneebaum cases involved deception and sexual ambiguity. The Castaneda affair, by far the most famous, highlighted deception and the paranormal. It seems no accident that they were found with ethnomethodology, a reflexive discipline.

Several important themes coincide in early ethnomethodology: tricksters, leveling of status, participation, and challenges to foundational assumptions.

Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK)

The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) also confronts reflexivity. It is a relatively new branch of science, emerging in the last 30 years, and many of the prominent SSK practitioners reside in Britain. It contrasts with older versions of sociology of science, which studied scientists, their institutions, and their social relations. SSK goes further and explores the nature, content, and truth of scientific knowledge. Social Studies of Science is the leading journal of the field; it has covered reflexivity and occasionally discussed parapsychology.

Researchers in SSK often take an ethnographic approach; they are more likely to conduct case studies rather than using survey questionnaires, which are more detached and distancing vis-à-vis the subjects. The practitioners sometimes become participant observers involved with the day-to-day activities of scientific laboratories. With this firsthand knowledge, they don’t have to rely on scientists’ interpretations and explanations of how they establish facts. Instead, the sociologists develop their own understanding of the process. Steve Woolgar, a leading figure in SSK, says that SSK researchers: “adopted the stance of an anthropologist joining a strange tribe, engaging in prolonged participant observation … This afforded the possibility of being deliberately sceptical about just those knowledge claims which seemed most evident and obvious to members of the tribe.”

Of course sociologists who discuss the “truth” of scientific knowledge appropriate the customary roles of laboratory scientists and philosophers. SSK practitioners assert that scientific facts are socially constructed, and some even challenge the philosophical idea of “fact.” This is consistent with strains of postmodernism, and SSK is associated with relativist perspectives; it opposes positivist, realist, and objectivist positions in the philosophy of science. Needless to say, SSK has sparked considerable debate and antagonism.

SSK innately involves reflexivity, and a number of its practitioners have addressed the topic. Ashmore’s already-mentioned book The Reflexive Thesis falls within the field, but he was not the only one to cover the issue. Steve Woolgar edited a volume entitled Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge (1988) with a number of useful contributions. The reader should be warned that the SSK discussions of reflexivity are formidable; they invoke such concepts as similarity, distance, and representation. They tread into arid philosophical areas where it is difficult to grasp any substance. Yet the articles are worth the effort, because the patterns and insights they identify can be overlooked when contemplating matters that are more concrete.

Two essays in Knowledge and Reflexivity are of particular interest: one by Woolgar and another by Bruno Latour. Neither is easy to summarize.

Representation and status are inherently part of the scientific process. Woolgar explained that a physicist tries to objectively describe (represent) electrons; he is “distant” from them. Similarly, an ethnographer portrays an exotic primitive people; the more exotic they appear, the more distant they are. The ethnographer and the primitive (like the physicist and electron) share little in common. Both the physicist and ethnographer seem “objective,” and their accounts are privileged and taken as true by readers. This is illustrated when an ethnographer’s explanation of primitives’ “superstitious” behavior is accepted as correct, but the primitives’ own understanding is ignored.

The physicist and ethnographer enjoy a higher status than the objects of their inquiry.

Participation is of theoretical interest in SSK. In much of sociology, participant-observation is carried out among marginal or low-status groups such as religious cults, the poor, or ethnic minorities. Sociologists dare not undertake comparable research with bankers, CEOs, or college presidents. Likewise, anthropologists may study primitive peoples, i.e., socially distant and “inferior.” However with SSK, there is not so much social distance between the observers and the observed. In fact the status of the objects of study may equal or exceed that of the researcher, at least initially. Scientists traditionally are assumed to be the final arbiters of scientific knowledge. But when they become objects of study and are described (represented) by sociologists, their legitimacy and reliability are called into question. Sociologists demonstrate that scientists are not as objective and rational as many people thought and that they are influenced by subjective and social factors in evaluating data. This naturally calls into question the authority, objectivity, and rationality of science, and it has the potential of reducing the status of scientists. As in liminality, there is a leveling or even inversion of status. Again we see the connection between reflexivity, status reduction, and participation—a connection also found in ethnomethodology. It is no accident that participation arose in Levy-Bruhl’s discussions of primitive mentality. Participation raises issues not only of status but also of the basis of rationality. These are discomforting matters, and Woolgar admitted that “Most social scientists tend to steer well clear of any sustained examination of the significance of reflexivity, despite frequently acknowledging its relevance in, „20 general terms.”

Bruno Latour’s essay in Knowledge and Reflexivity, “The Politics of Explanation: An Alternative,” holds a number of insights about information, abstraction, and explanation. Latour is from France, and the influence of French philosophy is apparent in his writing. Among other things, he explains why Garfinkel and the deconstructionists are so hard to understand, a charge that more than one commentator has made against Latour himself. Impenetrability is a frequent consequence of reflexivity, so here I will not try to summarize his presentation, but only his conclusions.

Latour concludes that when reflexivity is applied on a limited basis in the academic enterprise, it is often sterile and leads to little productivity. However he suggests that greater application of it should produce interdisciplinary pollination. Hybridization and increased

understanding across academic boundaries should result. I was very pleased to see this conclusion, because my own readings convinced me that an interdisciplinary approach was required to make progress with the topic of reflexivity (and of psychic phenomena). His explicit mention of “boundaries” (and their disruption) confirms the importance of them for understanding the repercussions of reflexivity. In short, La-tour’s essay marks him as a major theorist of the topic.

Replication of scientific experiments is one of the thorny problems tackled by SSK. It is a foundational issue of science. Most scientists accept the simple idea that valid experiments must be repeatable by others. But when the matter is closely examined, all sorts of complexities arise. What is replication? Who determines whether it is accomplished? How is it described? In controversial areas, simply doing more experiments doesn’t resolve issues about putative effects; there are continuing arguments about what is required for a satisfactory experiment. Slight changes in conditions may have important consequences, and those can be debated endlessly. Conducting more experiments can lead to what has been termed the “experimenter’s regress.” Do objective observations establish fact, or is it only social agreement? Further, written reports are not always sufficient to explain an experiment’s procedure. Sometimes direct personal training is required to teach the skill and convey the necessary information for successful replication. Abstract text is inadequate. SSK raises all these issues, and in a subtle but profound way it strikes a blow against the foundational myth that science is a fully objective process.

Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch are two of the leading sociologists who have investigated replication, and their work features prominently in both Ashmore’s and Woolgar’s books on reflexivity. Collins and Pinch are of added interest, because they have also studied the paranormal. In fact four of their books on sociology discuss parapsychology: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: A Source Book (1982), Frames of Meaning (1982), Changing Order (1985), and The Golem (1993). Additionally, they have written on CSICOP, and relatively early in his career Collins even carried out an investigation of psychic metal bending by children. He took part in a 1986 symposium sponsored by the Parapsychology Foundation, contributing a paper entitled “Scientific Knowledge and Scientific Criticism.” Parapsychology provided Collins and Pinch a natural choice for case material because replication has been a central issue in the field for decades.22

With SSK, and especially with its attentiveness to reflexivity, we see a constellation of ideas: loss of status, participation, questioning of

foundations, representation, and, as an apparent side issue, the paranormal. However abstractly formulated in SSK, these same matters lie at the heart of liminality and the trickster.

Experimenter Effects in Psychology

While Robert Rosenthal was analyzing an experiment for his Ph.D. dissertation in the mid-1950s, he was dismayed to discover that his data indicated that he had unintentionally biased his subjects (he had inadvertently “participated” in the experiment). This initially unwelcome discovery shaped his career, and he went on to study experimenter expectancy effects. After completing his doctorate, he conducted experiments with several lower echelon researchers. Each carried out the same procedure, but they were told to expect different results. Rosenthal demonstrated that significant biases could be thereby induced.23

Experimenting on experimenters is innately reflexive, and it raises the question of whether experimenters can objectively investigate the world. How extreme are their biases? The philosophical point disconcerted many psychologists, and Rosenthal received some sharp criticisms. In addition, some researchers claimed that they were unable to repeat his results (the replication problem). In the end, Rosenthal largely prevailed, and experimenter expectancy effects are now accepted as real. Nevertheless, his work raises questions about the ultimate validity of experimentation, but as with ethnomethodology, the especially troubling ones, the true foundational issues, are largely ignored.

Rosenthal went on to investigate how teachers’ expectancies influence their pupils. In a number of studies, grade school students were given an intelligence test, and afterwards teachers were told that some of them should intellectually bloom in the coming months. Unknown to the teachers, the “bloomers” were not selected by the test, but instead were designated randomly. Months later, another test was administered, and the randomly selected bloomers had increased their objective test scores more than the other students. Somehow the teachers had unconsciously transmitted their expectations to the students, who fulfilled them. This has sometimes been referred to as the

Rosenthal-Pygmalion effect. It attracted enormous attention (I remember my parents discussing it at the dinner table); it showed the relevance of psychological research in a way that everyone could understand.

Rosenthal later became one of the pioneers in the development of meta-analysis, a procedure to quantitatively evaluate large numbers of statistically-based studies. Much early work with meta-analysis was done in psychology, and it is now frequently used in medicine and other fields.

As in other instances of reflexivity, there is often a connection with the paranormal. This is true with Robert Rosenthal. In fact, the very first psychology experiment he conducted, while still in high school, was an ESP test, and he had even written to J. B. Rhine about it.25 This was not to be his only contact with the field. In the mid 1980s he was commissioned by the National Research Council (the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences) to provide a report on several areas of interest to the U.S. Army. When he came to positive conclusions about parapsychology, the NRC pressured him to remove that section. He refused, and they tried to suppress his findings.

Meditation

“Meditation” encompasses a wide range of practices; in some forms, a person may simply sit quietly with eyes closed and just observe what happens. Images, ideas, and feelings will emerge from the unconscious and display themselves to conscious awareness. Consciousness is used to observe consciousness, and thus the process is reflexive. Meditation blurs the area between the conscious and the unconscious.

Daniel Goleman gives a very useful overview of meditation in his book The Meditative Mind (1988). Goleman taught at Harvard, wrote for the New York Times for twelve years covering behavioral and brain sciences, and he was author of the best-selling book Emotional Intelligence (1995). He also spent two years in the Far East studying meditation. Goleman distinguishes between concentration, “in which mind focuses on a fixed mental object” and mindfulness “in which mind observes itself.” Mindfulness fits the definition for being reflexive. Concentration though is not far removed from it. Mind observes a “mental object,” i.e., a product of mind; thus even in concentration, mind is inwardly attentive of itself.

A number of meditative schools speak of encountering the void or the abyss. Malcolm Ashmore noted that those are other names for the problem of reflexivity. Adept meditators sometimes speak of the ineffable. Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach (1979) briefly discusses

Zen, a meditative discipline, saying “Zen is the fight against reliance on words.” (The same issue is raised in other contexts in which reflexivity is engaged. The obscurity of the writings of Garfinkel and of the deconstructionists also challenges the hegemony of words.)

Goleman reports that many traditions have warnings about the dangers of meditation and the need for purification before one engages in it. This signals a liminal, anti-structural domain, and this makes sense. In meditation, the outer physical world is disregarded. Its structure, order, and routine no longer hold the conscious mind to the regularities of existence.

Paranormal powers sometimes accompany meditative practice, and Goleman notes that they are explicitly addressed in the literature of the classical schools. Typically there are warnings against pursuing them; thus they are taboo within an already liminal domain. Meditation has had a long association with mysticism, and it is an integral part of mystical practice. Numerous mystics have displayed paranormal abilities. But the evidence regarding meditation and psi is not merely anecdotal. A number of laboratory studies have shown that meditation enhances ESP scoring in experimental tests.

Like other liminal activities, meditation became prominent in the U.S. in the late 1960s and 1970s. That period saw the burgeoning interest in the paranormal (and the emergence of ethnomethodology, SSK, and deconstructionism). The Transcendental Meditation movement attracted the Beatles and a number of movie stars. Academe began to take notice, and in 1969 Charles Tart published the anthology Altered States of Consciousness. It became a widely used text, and it had a section devoted to meditation. Tart, by the way, has authored several books and many papers on parapsychology.

In summary, meditation has a number of liminal features. It blurs the boundary between conscious and unconscious; its traditional schools warn of dangers; it is associated with mysticism and paranormal abilities. Many forms are inherently reflexive.

Mathematical Logic

Mathematical logic might seem to have little in common with sociology, meditation, or literary criticism, but reflexivity is found there as well. Kurt Godel, the foremost mathematical logician of the twentieth century, demonstrated the importance of reflexivity for mathematics. Born in Moravia in 1906, he attended the University of Vienna and took part in meetings of the Vienna Circle, a group of influential

philosophers of science, though he later made it known that he did not accept the doctrines associated with the Circle. In 1931 Godel published his Incompleteness Theorem, which rigorously showed that any consistent logical system of sufficient complexity is necessarily incomplete. There exist true statements about the system that must lie outside of it; they cannot be proven from within. The proof made use of self-reference; it used logic to study limits of logic and thus was reflexive. With this proof, Godel brought the issues of self-reference and reflexivity to the foundations of mathematics. For several decades prior, mathematicians had attempted to provide a fully logical basis for mathematics, and Godel demonstrated that was impossible. His proof was revolutionary.

By any measure Godel was a brilliant though odd character. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1934 and several times again during that decade. This period might be seen as a time of creative illness, to use Henri Ellenberger’s term. Godel emigrated to the U.S. and took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he remained from 1940 until his death in 1978. His social circle was quite limited, and he had no teaching responsibilities at the Institute, which further assured his rather isolated existence. His precisely logical mind sometimes led to problems in the normal social world where ambiguity plays a role. Near the end of his life, he was paranoid of doctors and medicine.

Godel had a more than passing interest in parapsychology. Several members of the Vienna Circle, including Godel apparently, took part in séances. His biographer, John Dawson, found a memorandum of his that appeared to be a record of a séance. Godel also believed his wife to have the ability to predict numbers generated by chance. His private papers demonstrate that he maintained an interest in such topics, including demonology, over a period of decades. Godel considered himself a Platonist, and his biographer Hao Wang noted that “he had spoken of rocks having experience and the spirits hiding out today,” though Wang was not sure how serious he was. At any rate, in Kurt Godel we find yet another example of the conjunction of reflexivity and the paranormal.

Initially, few recognized the importance of Godel’s incompleteness discovery (though John von Neumann did immediately). It took some time for many to grasp its implications, and it is only in the last two decades that they have come to significant public awareness. Scholars in other fields are taking notice; for instance, semiotics professor Floyd

Merrell has referred to Godel as “perhaps the greatest ‘deconstructor’ the Western World has seen.”35 The attention given Godel has been largely due to efforts of several popular authors. These have included Douglas Hofstadter with his classic Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), William Poundstone with The Recursive Universe (1985) and Labyrinths of Reason (1988), Rudy Rucker’s Infinity and the Mind (1982) and The Fourth Dimension (1984), Jeremy Campbell’s Grammatical Man (1982), Raymond Smullyan’s Satan, Cantor, and Infinity (1992), and John Casti with Searching for Certainty (1990).

Though these writers discuss reflexivity primarily in the context of mathematical logic, some of them have ventured further. Rudy Rucker in particular has pushed the boundaries, and he has discussed some intriguing connections with the paranormal. His The Fourth Dimension addresses spiritualism, synchronicity and telepathy, though he was unfortunately unaware of the scientific research on the matters he raised. In his Infinity and the Mind he acknowledges that “Infinity commonly inspires feelings of awe, futility, and fear,” a clear hint at the numinous.

Rucker is an interesting character; he is a descendant of Georg Wilhelm F. Hegel, the German philosopher; he holds a doctorate in mathematics, has written science fiction, and was a co-author of Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to The New Edge (1992) which included “cyberpunk, virtual reality, wetware, designer aphrodisiacs, artificial life, techno-erotic paganism,” and more. Such montage and mixing of diverse categories is typical of liminal and postmodern productions. This creativity extends to his mathematical writings, and it is an example of the hybridization and interdisciplinary pollination mentioned by Latour in reference to reflexivity.

There is one more person who has been instrumental in popularizing the topics of reflexivity and self-reference—Martin Gardner. He contributed blurbs to books by Hofstadter, Poundstone, Smullyan, Campbell, and Rucker, and he wrote a foreword to The Fourth Dimension.38

Martin Gardner

The person of Martin Gardner illuminates reflexivity. His work covers mathematics, magic, literary criticism, the paranormal, religion, and paradox, and he exemplifies the cross-pollination and hybridization that can accompany reflexivity. Gardner is a lively, fascinating,

and paradoxical character, and as such this section may provide a respite from the abstract philosophical matters that dominate this Part.

Gardner has also been the single most powerful antagonist of the paranormal in the second half of the twentieth century, and any cultural analysis of the paranormal must grapple with him. His innumerable books, articles, and life provide a wealth of material for examination. These illuminate the paranormal in a way rarely seen; for the antagonist not only instinctively identifies the weaknesses of the other, but also possesses some of the qualities he despises. Much is to be gained by studying him.

Gardner is an extraordinarily prolific and influential writer; his work has appeared in many magazines, and major publishing houses have produced his books. His recent anthology, The Night Is Large (1996), included a list of 56 of his books, and that was incomplete. For much of his career he lived in the New York City area and developed important contacts in the publishing industry. His influence is evidenced by the fact that he was allowed to review one of his own

works in the pages of the New York Review of Books.

His greatest fame came from the Mathematical Games column he wrote for Scientific American for a quarter century, and upon his retirement from it, several magazines carried articles about his career.41 After he retired, Douglas Hofstadter carried on for a while in the same vein preparing a similar series entitled “Metamagical Themas.” Gardner’s writings educated generations of mathematicians, computer and physical scientists, and engineers, and many who read him as children are now in positions of power. He has been celebrated by mathematicians, with Volume 22 (1990) of the Journal of Recreational Mathematics dedicated to him. Also, a book of essays, The Mathematical Gardner (1981), was prepared in his honor. But mathematics is not the only area in which he has achieved fame.

Gardner established his reputation in the paranormal in 1952 with his book In the Name of Science, which proved to be a landmark in debunking polemics. That work took a popular rather than scholarly approach; it contained no footnotes or list of references, and it established an aggressive, belittling style now common among debunkers of the paranormal. In 1957 the book was revised and released under the title Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, and it remains in print.

His numerous contacts in New York publishing helped him to promote the skeptical movement publicly and assist it behind the scenes. He aided C. E. M. Hansel in getting his academic, highly skeptical ESP: A Scientific Evaluation published in 1966; that book was probably the most detailed critique of the scientific parapsychology literature to that time. Undoubtedly Gardner has helped others. He was a founding member of CSICOP, and his circle of friends, including Marcello Truzzi, James Randi, and Ray Hyman had formed a loose group called RSEP (Resources for the Scientific Evaluation of the Paranormal) that was CSICOP’s immediate predecessor. Gardner also served as something of a father figure to magician James Randi, who went on to become the most visible spokesman for CSICOP. With these efforts and others, Gardner is justifiably referred to as the godfather of the skeptical movement.

Gardner was born in 1914 in Oklahoma. His father was a geologist and oilman and pantheist; his mother was a devout Methodist. As a teenager, Gardner embraced a strain of Protestant fundamentalism. He attended the University of Chicago intending to study physics, but he got sidetracked and majored in philosophy instead. He studied under Rudolf Carnap, who had been a leading figure in the Vienna Circle, and Gardner later edited a book of his. While at the university, Gardner underwent a religious crisis and rejected his high-school fundamentalism. The transition was painful, and in order to deal with it, he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel The Flight of Peter Fromm. That work remained unpublished until 1973, years later.

That book is narrated by Homer Wilson, a secular humanist professor, who tells the story of a young divinity student at the University of Chicago, Peter Fromm. Peter slowly rejects a literalist interpretation of the Bible and embraces a basically rationalistic one. The book is largely devoted to a discussion of Protestant theology, and Gardner shows great familiarity with the writings of Tillich, Barth, Niebuhr, Bultmann, Kierkegaard, and others. He obviously spent an enormous amount of time reading and pondering them. The Flight of Peter Fromm was engagingly written, and it was of sufficient merit to receive a review in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Thousands of others have undergone such transformations, but Gardner’s writing is valuable because it so clearly explains the issues, a characteristic of his prose generally. Both the book and his later commentaries on it express an antagonism toward ambiguity in religious matters. Much of his crisis of faith revolved around the literal truth of the resurrection of Christ, the Virgin Birth, and other miracles, and he was unable to accept the evidence for them. His striving for clarity led him to confront issues that many try to avoid.

The book was reprinted in 1994, by Paul Kurtz’s Prometheus Books, with an afterword in which Gardner discussed his early fundamentalism and reported that when he reread the book in order to prepare the afterword, that “it was agonizing to recall the doctrinal zigzags of my youth.” There is no question that religious issues have had a profound impact on his life, and he has a continuing preoccupation with them.

During his Chicago years, scholarship consumed Gardner. John Booth, a leading chronicler of magic and magicians, knew him as a young man and commented on his then “monk’s existence … [living] in a single plain room furnished only with a cot, desk and chair. In a few shoe boxes were filed stacks of cards on which he had laboriously summarized the total of all the knowledge that he felt he possessed.”

The philosophical bent never left Gardner, and he seems to prefer books, ideas, and abstractions to direct personal contact. Several have commented upon his shyness; though an active correspondent, Gardner almost never attends conferences. He has never made a presentation at a CSICOP convention, and when the Mathematical Association of America honored him at its annual meeting, he did not attend. As a writer, Gardner is a more solitary figure than those in academe who regularly interact with students and colleagues on a daily, face-to-face basis.

One cannot understand Gardner and his involvement in the paranormal without considering the entire corpus of his writings including those on conjuring, mathematics, logic, paradox, and religion. He freely intermixes these and does not treat them as separate, clearly demarcated fields of inquiry. This boundary blurring befits a trickster character. His views on the paranormal are intricately linked not only with religion, conjuring, and philosophy, but can even be seen in his writings on mathematics. Both in his person and in his work, he brings together topics that others keep separate.

Critic

In the last half-century, Gardner has been the most prolific and influential critic of the paranormal, and many of his essays on it have been compiled into anthologies including Science: Good, Bad and Bogus (1981), The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher (1988), and On the Wild Side (1992). A number of his other collections carry pieces on the paranormal as well. His commentary on psychical research runs the gamut from obscure figures in its history such as Johann Zöllner,

Douglas Blackburn, and Leonora Piper to more modern, laboratory psi research conducted at Duke University, Stanford Research Institute and elsewhere.

Gardner’s role as paranormal critic cannot be appreciated without knowing his background in conjuring. Magic has been his life-long hobby, and he began writing on it while still a teenager. Though he does not perform publicly, he has made innumerable contributions to that field. Among other periodicals, Gardner contributed to The Jinx, a newsletter edited by Ted Annemann, perhaps the most creative mentalist of the twentieth century. A Gardner piece appeared in the 1938 Summer Extra issue, and the cover story of the immediately following number, August 1938, was devoted to a critique of Rhine‘s work by Annemann. This kind of article is not uncommon in the magic literature, but parapsychologists are almost completely unaware of it. Gardner though has had a long exposure to that venue of criticism, and that helped shape his life.

Gardner‘s interest in magic was not limited to mentalism, and he produced the 574-page Encyclopedia of Impromptu Magic (1978), which was compiled from his numerous magic magazine columns. Much of that material is pertinent for close-up situations, where a magician performs within a few feet, or even inches, of spectators. Knowledge of close-up magic is required for evaluating demonstrations of claimed PK such as bending keys or spoons or levitating small objects. Stage magic, on the other hand, is largely irrelevant for such assessments. Thus Gardner is particularly well qualified to comment on deception and the paranormal.

Much of his criticism of psychical research focuses on possibilities of cheating. He has an ability to quickly spot methods magicians might use in overcoming controls. His attacks are usually on the mark, but they are not always recognized as such by those whom he criticizes, investigators who typically have no knowledge of conjuring. Nearly all of Gardner’s criticisms have been leveled at reports of individuals gifted with psychic powers. He avoids commenting on experiments that test groups of ordinary people who claim no special abilities, though such studies constitute the bulk of formal parapsychological research. The problem of deception is much less severe in research with groups than with investigations of a talented individual.

Though little of his criticism is directed at work published in the refereed parapsychology journals, a notable exception is his book How Not to Test a Psychic: Ten Years of Remarkable Experiments with Renowned Clairvoyant Pavel Stepanek (1989). Stepanek, a clerk and resident of Prague, was extensively tested in the 1960s, but he is little known outside parapsychology. He obtained outstanding results in a set of tedious card experiments in which he was asked to guess which face of a card was uppermost inside a container (typically the cards had a green and a white side). This was a binary decision with a 50% chance of being correct on a trial. Many papers were published on Stepanek in the parapsychology journals as well as one in Nature, and for some years the research was considered landmark work in the field.

Gardner attacked it from the perspective of a magician. He suggested ways that subtle sensory cues coupled with cheating could explain the results. He also addressed potential randomization flaws on which Stepanek might have capitalized. Overall, he convincingly demonstrated that the investigators did not use sufficiently strict controls and did not understand methods a magician might use to cheat. The parapsychologists’ responses were surprisingly weak. Only Jurgen Keil attempted a defense, and that was brief. Given the voluminous research with Stepanek, the limited response to Gardner is surprising. This is partly explained by the cogency of Gardner’s assault, but also because the Stepanek work has relatively little relationship to other major research in the field either theoretically or procedurally. As the original studies were published in professional parapsychology journals, Gardner’s attack constitutes one of the strongest indictments of the field on its inability to institute adequate safeguards against trickery.51

How Not to Test a Psychic is an extremely detailed, technical work, and because the potential readership is small, I was surprised that the book was published. I would be more surprised to learn that even 10—15 people read it with any thoroughness. It is to his and his publisher’s credit that the critique saw print. Considering the breadth and depth of his effort, the only comparable attack from a CSICOP member focussing on a particular line of research is Ray Hyman’s 1985 critique of the ganzfeld, which was substantially refuted. Gardner demonstrated a capability to address a sophisticated research effort. He proved himself a formidable critic on certain technical matters, far more so than a number of professional psychologists who have published skeptical books on psychical research.

All this is not to say that Gardner’s critiques are without flaws, and there have been some ethical questions raised about his methods. Gardner wrote to Stepanek and suggested that he give an interview describing how he cheated. Gardner offered to help publicize it and arrange for a documentary film that would bring him money and fame. Stepanek refused, a fact that tends to support his honesty. Some may see Gardner’s attempt as one of bribery to suborn testimony. He seems to have been embarrassed by the matter, and when his letter to Stepanek became known, he threatened to sue if it was published.53

Another facet that detracts from Gardner’s full credibility is that he has been unwilling to submit to the discipline required for scientific publication. He has chosen to publish his work in unrefereed, popular forums where he is not subject to peer review and full and open rebuttal. Unfortunately this led him into errors that he might not have otherwise made.

A most surprising series of mistakes is found in his comments on the statistics of the Stepanek work. His remarks reveal an ignorance and carelessness entirely unexpected from someone who has written so clearly on probability and someone so honored by mathematicians. For instance, on page 67 of How Not to Test a Psychic he cites a study where Stepanek achieved 2636 hits out of 5000 trials giving a deviation from chance of 136, but Gardner claims that this is very close to chance level. In fact, as the original report states, that score gives a z = 3.85 with a p =.00012 (2-tailed). This is a very significant result, and anyone familiar with these kinds of calculations, even seeing just the raw score, should immediately recognize the outcome to be significant. It is hard to understand how Gardner made this mistake.

This is not the only such error; on page 98 he cites a series with 225 hits in 400 trials, 25 hits above chance, and he again claims this to be at chance level, which clearly it is not (p =.007, one-tailed). Ironically, in the paragraph immediately preceding this claim, Gardner cites an earlier Stepanek series with 400 hits out of 800 trials. He goes on to say that this “tends to cast suspicion on the reliability of the data” because the result was exactly at chance. He correctly gives the probability of obtaining exactly that score (p =.028). This is of marginal significance at best, and the value is much larger than those p-values he incorrectly claimed were at chance.

This is not an isolated example, and throughout his book, Gardner voices suspicion of any score close to the expected mean and suggests that there may be some problem with the data. Of those instances I noticed, all those of which he was suspicious had associated probability values of.028 or greater and some as high as.09. There were hundreds of runs with Stepanek, the large majority not particularly close to the exact mean chance value. Gardner gives the reader no reason whatever to suspect that the number of scores very close to the expected mean was any greater than chance would allow. He could have made a calculation to address the matter, but he failed to do so. His complaints are simply examples of selective reporting, a well known statistical fallacy.

Several places in the book Gardner admits that he had friends do calculations for him. Surprisingly, those were very simple computations that are typically taught the first few weeks of any introductory class in statistics. Ironically, back in 1979, Gardner was interviewed and asked about mathematics in parapsychology. He stated “I’m going to do a column that will discuss this whole aspect of contemporary parapsychology, and the need for a more sophisticated understanding of some of the statistics involved.”5 55

Statistics is not the only area where Gardner is less capable than might be expected. His comments on more general scientific matters also reveal deficits. For instance, he asserted that “There is no way a skeptic can comment meaningfully on the Honorton and Schmidt experiments, because there is no way, now that the tests are completed, to know exactly what controls were in force.”56 In fact, since that statement was made, a number of skeptical psychologists have published assessments of both Honorton’s and Schmidt’s work. Similar evaluations are made in all other areas of science and have been for decades. Journal articles contain a great deal of information that allows assessment, and that is why the details are published. Reviewers frequently contact authors when additional information is required. This happens in all sciences. Gardner was amazingly uninformed about how scientific research is actually conducted, reported, and evaluated.57

One should remember that Gardner has a strong background in philosophy, but he has not had the advantage of carrying out day-today scientific research. He has only a philosopher’s idealized conception of science, and his remarks must be interpreted in that light. In the last 25 years, sociologists have demonstrated that the process of science is rather different than philosophers thought, and that is particularly germane for skeptics of the paranormal. Trevor Pinch and Harry Collins, two prominent researchers in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), have shown that participating in scientific research changes one’s understanding of it. To illustrate their point, they investigated CSICOP and concluded that if the Committee wished to maintain its philosophical view of science it should not engage in research, and in fact, CSICOP established a policy against conducting research itself.58 Gardner is not oblivious to SSK and its ramifications, and he has been a critic of Collins and Pinch, particularly on the topic of relativism, but he has not addressed their findings on CSICOP.59

Gardner is also sometimes beyond his ken when he discusses technical and theoretical issues of parapsychology. He has complained that PK effects in experiments typically rely upon statistical deviations for detection rather than direct movements of mechanical objects. That objection is laden with assumptions about how psi works. vast amounts of research demonstrate that psi does not act like a mechanical force, and several plausible theoretical explanations have been presented to explain that. Gardner seems totally unaware of them. Yet when parapsychologists respond to his uninformed remarks he replies offering gratuitous comments such as “I find it puzzling that Rao and Palmer cannot understand such simple reasoning.”

Even in magic, his knowledge is spotty in some areas. For instance, he has asserted that “Conjurors are indeed the enemy [of psychic researchers].” Through his popular writings, Gardner has been largely responsible for the canard that magicians are generally skeptical of the existence of psychic phenomena. Perhaps his relative isolation keeps him away from a broad cross-section of magicians. In fact studies have shown that the majority of conjurors believe in the paranormal, and a number of eminent ones have participated in psychical, 62 research.

The general style of his criticisms is unlike that found in scientific journals. His are often biting, derisive, personal, and peppered with words such as “laughable,” “ridiculous,” with allusions to “youthful indiscretions,” and references to parapsychologists as “Geller-gawkers.” He makes liberal use of innuendo. The prestige endowed by his long association with Scientific American, coupled with the low status of his targets, allow him tactics that otherwise would be considered reprehensible. He is aware of it, and he frankly acknowledged that he and his colleagues “felt that when pseudoscience is far enough out on the fringes of irrationalism, it is fair game for humor, and at times even ridicule.” Gardner popularized H. L. Mencken’s aphorism “one horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms,” using it as an epigraph for his Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, making it something of a motto for debunkers.

His extensive sarcasm and ridicule should alert readers that something other than detached, dispassionate analysis is involved in his critiques. Even though he is skeptical, Gardner undeniably has a deep fascination with the paranormal. He has expended enormous intellectual effort, professional time, and personal energy on it. Paranormal claims enrage him and occasionally provoke his naive and emotional outbursts. This says something important about the phenomena. Even skeptics do not remain untouched by them. Gardner is a particularly important example because he directly confronts claims and deals with them in an extended fashion. As such, he has more immediate contact with the paranormal than those academics who simply dismiss it or comment on more abstracted issues such as belief in psychic abilities. Over seventy years ago, Walter Franklin Prince described the “enchanted boundary” and explained that when skeptics cross it they generally display a loosening of intellectual judgement and emotional restraint. Gardner is an example.

Gardner is at least somewhat aware of the psychological factors affecting his views of parapsychology. In his essay “Science: Why I Am Not a Paranormalist” he explained that the idea of telepathy makes him uneasy: “I also value the privacy of my thoughts. I would not care to live in a world in which others had the telepathic power to know what I was secretly thinking, or the clairvoyant power to see what I was doing.” He also wrote that “PK opens up even more terrifying possibilities. I am not enthusiastic over the possibility that someone who dislikes me might have the power from a distance to cause me harm.”65 These statements raise a fundamental issue—paranoia. Though I am not suggesting that Gardner is paranoid, his concerns are paranoiac, and it is to his credit that he recognizes potentials of psi that most parapsychologists wish to ignore. Paranoia is an important issue, and it is intricately linked to mirrors and reflexivity. A later chapter is devoted to it.

Gardner and Religion

Many people are surprised to learn that Gardner is not an atheist. He believes in God and in prayer as can be seen in his The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. But because so many have been amazed when I told them this, I suspect that some of them thought that I misinterpreted Gardner or somehow took him out of context. So I wrote to him, and he confirmed his belief in “a personal god, prayer, and life after death” (letter to author, 16 Nov 96). The religious crisis of his youth led him to reject his Protestant fundamentalism, but he did not reject God.

Gardner’s virulent attacks on the paranormal are not based solely on its frequent association with deceit. Nor is his antagonism founded only on the unpleasant ramifications of psi. Gardner’s antipathy has deeper roots. His essay “Prayer: Why I Do Not Think It Foolish” is revealing; for in it he says: “It is possible that paranormal forces not yet established may allow prayers to influence the material world, and I certainly am not saying this possibility should be ruled out a priori … As for empirical tests of the power of God to answer prayer, I am among those theists who, in the spirit of Jesus’ remark that only the faithless look for signs, consider such tests both futile and blasphemous … Let us not tempt God.”66

Nor is the above quote an isolated example. He also objects to interpreting miracles in terms of parapsychological concepts. He goes on to say that “If I were an orthodox Jew or Christian, I would find such attempts to explain biblical miracles to be both preposterous and an insult to God.” Obviously he feels that attempts to explain the workings of God in scientific parapsychological terms diminish the concept of divinity. God is to be exalted, not tested.

These statements cannot be ignored if one wishes to understand his views of parapsychology. The importance of them should not be underestimated, because he has stated that “Of my books, the one that I am most pleased to have written is my confessional, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, with my novel about Peter Fromm running second.” Obviously Gardner’s opposition is of a different order than most CSICOP followers, and I suspect that few of them appreciate this basis of his opinions. A rationalist debunker encountering the above passages might unconsciously skip over them, or perhaps think them to be in jest, because in the vast bulk of his writings on the paranormal Gardner gives no inkling of his underlying religious feelings. Despite his influence among debunkers, his Whys was not reviewed in the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer or the parapsychology journals. Perhaps they didn’t know quite what to make of it.