J.E. Kennedy wrote me a nice email regarding my blog post on his review of Chris Carter's book, and, at my request, gave me permission to post the entire message.
Consider this post a continuation of "Kennedy v. Carter," published on January 25.
Here's the email:
George Hansen recently suggested that I take a look at the discussion on your blog of my review of Chris Carter’s book. It appears that the discussion has been limited because my review has not been openly available. I have now put it on my website for those who are interested at http://jeksite.org/psi/jp12rev.pdf. In writing the review, I thought the last paragraph was the most important point. In the posted review, I also added a link to a concise summary of my conclusions about paranormal phenomena at http://jeksite.org/psi/conclusions.pdf. I developed that summary because there is such a strong propensity to try to put me (and everyone else) into simplistic, polarized boxes for proponent or skeptic, without recognizing the problematic gray area that has actually dominated psychical research for the past 130 years. As noted in the book review, parapsychology is stuck and will remain stuck until the problematic areas are confronted.
I noticed some comments that parapsychology lacked resources to do good research. That may indicate that those participating in your blog are not aware of George Hansen’s discussion of the decline of parapsychology at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0jMPQnVV-U. In fact, parapsychology had substantial resources and was growing into the 1980s, but was unable to produce results that could maintain the interest of the funding sources. The current lack of resources reflects the failure to produce effective research results when they had the opportunity. This is another manifestation of the failure to confront the problematic properties of psi (as well as possibly poor management of research programs).
Jim Kennedy