Comments on "Scienceand the Supernatural"

80 Years of the Journal of Parapsychology: An Historical Overview

“…B. Rhine (1955aRhine ( , 1955b, and Soal (1955), followed by Letters to Science or the JP by James Crumbaugh (1955), Ralph Erickson (1955), Waldron Gardiner (1955), Gibson (1955), Jack Kapchan (1955), McConnell (1955, Ozanne (1955), and Kendon Smith (1955), as well as a brief reply by George Price (1955b) to the original critiques. The exchange ended with summary remarks by J.…”

“Error Some Place!”

“…By 1940 nearly one million experimental trials had been reported under conditions which precluded sensory leakage. These included five studies in which the target cards were enclosed in opaque sealed envelopes (41,45,46,54,59), 16 studies employing opaque screens (7,8,11,19,33,34,35,38,41,42,44,45,46,59,71), ten studies involving separation of subjects and targets in different buildings (50,51,52,53,34,32,8,77,61,60), and two studies involving precognition tasks (59,75). These data are summarized in Table 1.…”

“…This discovery circulated widely for a time as an explanation of all successful (i.e., statistically ciignificant) experimental series. T h e parapsychologists retorted that defective cards had not been employed in any of the experiments reported in the literature and that, in any case, they could not account for results from st tidie5 involving adequate screening with such devices as opaque envelopes, screens, distance, or work involving the precognition paradigm in which the target sequences were not generated until after the subject had made his responses (53,54,72).…”

A Skeptical Eye on Psi

“…The Price article lead to a lively discussion(Meehl & Scriven, 1956;Price, 1956;Rhine, 1956;Soal, 1956). Many years later,Price (1972) issued a brief apology for having suggested that Rhine and Soal engaged in research fraud.…”