Criticism
According to sceptical commentators, such as Martin Gardner, Rhine's results have never been duplicated. This includes the claim that Rhine repeatedly tried to replicate his work, but produced only failures that he never reported.
Gardner also criticized Rhine for not disclosing the names of assistants he caught cheating:
His paper "Security Versus Deception in Parapsychology" published in his journal (vol. 38, 1974), runs to 23 pages. Rhine selects twelve sample cases of dishonest experimenters that came to his attention from 1940 to 1950, four of whom were caught "red-handed". Not a single name is mentioned. What papers did they publish, one wonders.
This has suggested to Gardner that Rhine practised a "secrecy policy".
Gardner has also claimed to have inside information that Rhine's files contain "material suggesting fraud on the part of Hubert Pearce", but such information has not been independently confirmed.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Banks Rhine
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)