Questioning Skepticism

 

In case you have nothing to do on a Friday, here is a two hour discussion between Emerson Green and some dude about Bigfoot, anti-Bigfoot skepticism and Skepticism (TM) in general. Green is right that Skeptics love to psychoanalyze "true believers" but resist anyone else psychoanalyzing *them*. And yet, many Skeptics probably hold their opinions for reasons of social status or fear of being seen as stupid, rather than for strictly "rational" or "factual" reasons.

That being said, I don´t think the case for Bigfoot is particularly strong. Micah Edvenson (the other guy) points out that there are about 1,000 "confirmed" eye witness reports of the Loch Ness monster. Yet, these reports were to a large extent triggered by hoaxed photos! Also, detailed studies of the loch have shown (more or less conclusively) that there isn´t any strange creature there. If 100% of cryptid reports from just one location during a period of almost a century aren´t veridical, what does this tell us about the general reliability of eye witnesses? Surely, this has consequences for other cryptids, too.

Green (who is the more Bigfoot-curious of the two) points out that the believers in Bigfoot´s existence have a problem. On the one hand, they claim that the creature is very rare or at least elusive, which would explain why no dead body has ever been found, the number of photos is minor, and so on. On the other hand, however, the believers also claim to have tens of thousands of Bigfoot reports from all over North America! But that suggests that the squatch *isn´t* rare at all. To this, I could add that Bigfoot supposedly runs across highways (right in front of speeding vehicles!), invades the back yards of heavily armed private citizens, and is seen even on the flatlands of Kansas. Surely *some* carcass should have been found after generations of this behavior? Or at least a squatchy photo of a hairy fairy munching on Kansan corn.

An alternative hypothesis, also mentioned in the discussion, is that most reports outside California and the Pacific Northwest are misidentifications. However, on the West Coast, Bigfoot is real. The problem with this speculation is that there doesn´t seem to be any particular differences in the quality or quantity of Bigfoot evidence from the rest of North America as compared to the West Coast region. It´s all the same, suggesting that the explanation must be the same in both cases. 

Which doesn´t necessarily mean that the explanans has to be entirely naturalistic or boring. Green is an eye witness of a far stranger cryptid than the Sasquatch: the Michigan Dog-Man. He ends his discussion with Edvenson by discussing ghosts, mentioning one particularly compelling case. And no, Green isn´t a materialist but rather a dualist or panpsychist. 

With that, I close this little informal conversation.