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:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (18841962)