Will
New
After all the buzz over Sheldrake's Wikipedia page, I took a look at other psychical articles on the site. Ian Stevenson's page has been revised over the past year as well. Among the most significant additions is this section:
The only reference for this passage is a list of page numbers from the books of Paul Edwards - books that I haven't read, do not wish to buy, and cannot find at the local library.
I haven't heard of Ransom before, and I'd be interested in learning about any responses to the charges he makes, if anyone could point me in the right direction to find some. I know that other psychologists - skeptical ones at that - didn't consider Stevenson's questions to the children "leading questions," but they weren't responding to Ransom or anyone else in particular.
(NOTE: I'd rather this thread not get into more talk about the inadequacies of Wikipedia or the presence of skeptics in editorial; I really just want to focus on Stevenson and Ransom.)
Champe Ransom, a lawyer Stevenson hired as an assistant in the 1970s, wrote an unpublished report about Stevenson's work, which is cited by Edwards in his Immortality (1992) and Reincarnation (1996). According to Ransom, Stevenson asked the children leading questions, filled in gaps in the narrative, did not spend enough time interviewing them, and left too long a period between the claimed recall and the interview; it was often years after the first mention of a recall that Stevenson learned about it. In only 11 of the 1,111 cases Ransom looked at had there been no contact between the families of the deceased and of the child before the interview; in addition, according to Ransom, seven of those 11 cases were seriously flawed. He also wrote that there were problems with the way Stevenson presented the cases, in that he would report his witnesses' conclusions, rather than the data upon which the conclusions rested. Weaknesses in cases would be reported in a separate part of his books, instead of during the discussion of the cases themselves. Ransom concluded that it all amounted to anecdotal evidence of the weakest kind.
The only reference for this passage is a list of page numbers from the books of Paul Edwards - books that I haven't read, do not wish to buy, and cannot find at the local library.
I haven't heard of Ransom before, and I'd be interested in learning about any responses to the charges he makes, if anyone could point me in the right direction to find some. I know that other psychologists - skeptical ones at that - didn't consider Stevenson's questions to the children "leading questions," but they weren't responding to Ransom or anyone else in particular.
(NOTE: I'd rather this thread not get into more talk about the inadequacies of Wikipedia or the presence of skeptics in editorial; I really just want to focus on Stevenson and Ransom.)