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- 25 - 5.0 _DOWSING AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH_ Problematical
Truth_ At the 1991 ASD
West Coast Conference, several times I heard the remark "If you don't believe me, dowse it for yourself".
This bothered me for several reasons. First of all, we beginning dowsers all know from our own experience that
asking the wrong question, or an imprecise question, may result in dowsing misleading information -
misleading in the sense that the response is, at best, only partially true. We beginning dowsers are also aware
that answers from dowsing may only reflect our own, or someone else's, fantasy or projection, or our own subconscious
predilections. With experience, we become better and more accurate dowsers. Secondly, we are aware
that verifying what we dowse can be problematical. When an experienced water dowser consistently finds
her/his predictions confirmed by well drillers, we have verification. But what of dowsing for health and
UFOs? In health problems, all sorts of things are going on in a person, and it is problematic whether dowsing
is successful, either in describing a problem accurately, or in helping a person to heal. When a person recovers,
it is problematic what effect dowsing had: was it a placebo effect, a prayer, a harmless adjunct to medical
treatment? There are so many variables involved, and so little that we truly understand
in such situations. With UFOs, the situation is worse: What is "true" seems
dependent upon the conceptual framework of the believer (Vallee 1988). Thirdly, there seems to
be something peculiar about a dowser saying, "If you don't believe me, dowse it for yourself", when the majority
of the human community may not believe in dowsing at all. Certainly, it has a peculiar
ring in a nation whose scientific community (by and large) claims that dowsing is silly folklore. Having
stated the problems as I see them, I shall attempt to sort out some of the issues. Veridical Perception and Truth_ Our FIRST level of what
is true seems to grow out of "what we believe from our own eyes". This is the sense in which we claim that our perceptions
are true (veridical perception), but hallucinations, mirages, dreams, etc, are not truth. Even in perception,
there are problems and mistakes. For example: I am walking in a field, and I see what I take to be a person waving at me.
I walk on, and I realize that what I saw was a small tree moving in the breeze. On the other hand,
there is a sense in which we may argue that dreams, etc., while not literally true, are true in some metaphorical or symbolic
sense. Also, we are familiar with the problems of the legal system: how can people who
saw the same scene come to such different views of what they "saw"? I believe it is within the framework
of veridical perception that we agree who is, and who is not, a successful dowser of water, minerals, and other phenomena
that we can perceive, and that it is within this framework that we discuss and resolve differences of opinion and interpretation
of our dowsing work.
- 26 - Communal "Common Sense" Truth_ However, there is a SECOND level at which truth becomes entangled with our
personal beliefs, and the beliefs and the conceptual framework of our community. This is the sense of truth
in which we say that our forebears truly believed that the earth was flat, but today we truly know that it is round. This
is the realm of the saying "Today's science, tomorrow's common sense, and the next day's nonsense",
for human history is strewn with beliefs which were outlandish when first announced, later accepted as common sense, and still
later discarded. The most common example, I suppose, is our theory
of gravity: from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein. Today, our scientific community acts as if Relativity
Theory and Quantum Mechanics were the end of the story for all time, but any historian of science can cite examples over the
past 500 years when scientists felt that way, and were later proven wrong. We dowsers know that dowsing can lead to truth,
no matter what scientists and our 21st century world community believes. Also, we dowsers know that there
is wisdom in the beliefs and practices of Feng Shui, Geomancy, and Shamanism, even if practitioners of those ancient
arts were ignorant of modern science and technology, and even if we today are puzzled as to how to reconcile those ancient
traditions with our modern society. Historically, religion and science, in their separate ways, have sought to overcome cultural
relativity (culturally relative truth) by claiming to have found an absolute method to absolute truth. Given
the diversity of religious and scientific "truth" over the centuries, such claims to "absolute truth"
become problematic. So today, many theorists in both fields adopt a learning approach and a tolerance for
error. In our own time, we have heard Christian leaders say that, yes, at one time some Christians thought non-white human
races were inferior, but today Christians know that was morally wrong; and we have heard scientists state that science is
a self-corrective methodology, that all of today's theories are subject to becoming false in the future. Realism, Conceptual
Relativity, and Theoretical Truth_ These considerations lead me to a THIRD level of "truth seeking": what are the ground-rules
for understanding dowsing claims to truth, in a society that, on the whole, denies the validity of any dowsing claims? I'll
introduce this topic by responding to those who might ask: "What difference does it make, as long
as our dowsing techniques work?" - shades of "pragmatic truth". My response is to consider
the history of radionics machines: - At first, skilled specialists built and used these electronic machines.- Then someone found that the machine worked, even if were not plugged into an electrical outlet.- Then someone else discovered the machine was not needed, just use the
wiring diagram.- Then Fran Farley found she got the same answers,
using a small pine board (no machine at all).- Nowadays, some
dowsers just rub their fingers together, and feelings of rough or smooth skin provide answers.
- 27 -What is the truth? From the
story, I gather that as a practical matter, the machine worked when plugged in, when not plugged in, when represented by a
wiring diagram, when reduced to a pine board, and when reduced to the dowsing reaction of rough/smooth skin. This story (from
Fran Farley) is typical of human technology: the original technique worked, but was not the whole story, and gave way to new
techniques. The critic would like to know what event causes what reaction. If the key to radionics
is in the operator's smooth/rough skin response, then the machine itself does not play a necessary role in the causal
chain of events, so the machine is not part of the "ultimate truth" of the matter. What I am getting at is that
when we speak of "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth", we want an account that conforms to the
reality of the world, not just something that happens to work. Historically, "reality" was problematic. Traditionally,
philosophers fused logic, morality, and causality. Thus Leibniz (circa 1700) proposed that this is "the best of all possible
worlds" because God is constrained by the laws of logic and morality to create none other. But Wittgenstein (circa 1920)
pointed out to Bertrand Russell that all of mathematics/logic is "tautologies, hence no surprises", and most logicians
(except Godel with his paradoxical theorem) now believe that logic is a linguistic construction of the human mind, not a part
of the external world. The traditional claim was that you cannot deduce "ought from is"; so the moral order
is separate from the causal order, as post-modernists claim (Wilson 1998, pp 40-44, pp 214-215). But Searle (1969, ch 8) did
deduce "ought from is". Waal (1996) describes how human morality evolved from primate behavior. Thus logic
and morality are created by mind/consciousness, which is a product of evolution, within causality. There is a growing realization
among psychologists and others that, as Tibetan Buddhism told us long ago, each of us human beings seems to be trapped in
a model of the world, a model that each of us builds and projects onto the world (Freeman 2000). We act
according to the model, and revise it when it fails. In the case of perception (in the case cited above), my mind sees something
in the distance, interprets it as a person waving at me, and when that proves wrong and I decide it is really a tree blowing
in the wind, my mind revises my model to project a tree, rather than a person, into my model of the world. But I did not actually
"see the world". Rather, my mind/brain built a model of the world, a model I can keep or change,
depending upon my personal experience; mind/consciousness evolved within the causal order. Each of us is trapped in
our own private "conceptual relativism". However, all is not lost. If our
model includes the concept of a real world and a concept of our causal connection to that world, we can validate our picture
of the world: accepting realism (Wilson 1998, Searle 2007), rejecting post-modernism. My proposal is that, just as we learn
"to see" the world, so we also learn to dowse the reality outside ourselves; and just as we can make perceptual
mistakes, so we can make dowsing mistakes, and just as we can correct our perceptual mistakes, so we can (with experience)
correct our dowsing mistakes. But we are unable to verify all of our beliefs at the same time, so we build "theories"
that, if true, would account for our experience of the world. So theories come and go, as we learn more
about our world. Thus dowsing is not self-authenticating (self-proving), but an extension of (fallible) human
perception. Dowsing does not make the knowledge claims of an intuitive mysticism that transcend the natural world. "Scientific
naturalism" is the idea that everything that exists is part of nature (including gods and spirits), and all of it is
subject to scientific inquiry (Searle 2007 pp 1-36), but there are layers to reality. First, there is physical reality (snow
on Mount Everest, and the causal order of physics: electrons, etc).
- 28 - Second, there is the phenomenal (psychological) world of our experience of sensory qualities, emotions,
thoughts, and truth (veridical truth) with respect to this phenomenal world; even though this sensory world may turn
out to be "real" only in our minds, and not in the external physical world. Third, there is the social world we
construct (Searle 2010), of marriage and money, which is a socially real world (based on the objects of physical reality,
but incorporating social rules and interpretations). So, in psychology, we are working in
the realm of our inter-subjective conceptual systems in which there is truth and error relative to our conceptual framework,
even though the whole framework may be "false" in the ultimate reality of physics outside our minds; and the "moral
order" evolved out of the causal order. Thus, the search for truth is a multi-layered process. We
begin with our perceptions, verifying what we can and guessing about the rest. Sometimes we become so sure
that our speculations account for the world, that we dogmatically assert that our theories are true - only to
to eat our words, as reality gives us feed-back that we do not yet have the whole truth.
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