An
article on smithsonian.com discusses the history of crop circles and why people believe in them. Part of the reason is the paradox of ostension. Fake evidence, even if proven fake, nevertheless tends to reinforce belief:
False evidence intended to corroborate an existing legend is known to folklorists as “ostension.” This process also inevitably extends the legend. For, even if the evidence is eventually exposed as false, it will have affected people’s perceptions of the phenomenon it was intended to represent. Faked photographs of UFOs, Loch Ness monsters and ghosts generally fall under the heading of ostension. Another example is the series of photographs of fairies taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths at Cottingley, Yorkshire, between 1917 and 1920. These show that the motive for producing such evidence may come from belief, rather than from any wish to mislead or play pranks. One of the girls insisted till her dying day that she really had seen fairies—the manufactured pictures were a memento of her real experience. And the photos were taken as genuine by such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—the great exponent, in his Sherlock Holmes stories, of logic.
According to Jan Harold Brunvand in
The Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, there are a number of varieties of ostension.
Ostension itself involves people inspired to act out legends. Examples of this would be "people forming satanic groups and practicing rituals based on stories they have heard, as well as carrying out mutilations, sacrifices, murders, or other crimes." Then there's
pseudo-ostension, in which people pretend to act out legends. Example: "teenagers dressing as the grim reaper to scare other teens visiting a legend-trip site." Finally, there's
quasi-ostension in which people use legends to explain mysterious events. Example: "observers interpret some puzzling information (such as cattle mutilations) not as a likely result of natural causes (like the work of predators) but as resulting from cult activity or visits from extraterrestrials, as described in rumors and legends."
Comments
One of my favorite ACD bits:
...Conan Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers...Houdini was apparently unable to convince Conan Doyle that his feats were simply illusions, leading to a bitter public falling out between the two.
-wikipedia (but still accurate)
Doyle is hardly the only one who acted/acts like that, unfortunately.
As it happens, climate change is a prime area for ostension, as we've seen with the recent fuss over the Himalayan glacier prediction in the IPCC report. The IPCC admitted its mistake and retracted the erroneous statement, which ought to have established its concern for accuracy. Instead, in some people's minds the incident has generated an air of dishonesty around the IPCC.
[Note: those acknowledged to be fakes have none of these characteristics]
- How all the stalks are laid down without breaking any of them;
- How every two rows are braided together;
- How the soil below them contains the same set of ten short-life radioactive isotopes not found outside of the lab;
- How the roots of the plants involved have tiny metallic nodules attached to them, in a distribution inversely proportional to the distance from the center of each circle.
Now, this doesn't necesssarily mean non-human organisms - intelligent or otherwise - are at work , but that is one possibility (the others being either some unknown natural phenomenon or some group of humans using an unknown technology.
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And by the way, religion can't be proven or disproven by logic, so ostension doesn't apply. We can however, apply logic to the belief in God per se, and we of course then find that atheism and agnosticism are irrational, that in fact theism is the only rational position.
In your list of "characteristics of the 'genuine' crop circle" you are conflating different myths. For example,
- How the roots of the plants involved have tiny metallic nodules attached to them, in a distribution inversely proportional to the distance from the center of each circle.
The tiny metallic nodules were iron particles found in one crop circle (Yatesbury, Wiltshire, 1993) and the "distribution inversely proportional to the distance from the center of each circle" comes from Dr Haselhoff's paper describing the distribution of bent nodes on wheat stalks "caused by a ball of light" floating over the centre.
Also, the "ten short-life radioactive isotopes" finding was retracted by its primary author a few weeks after it was published in 1992, albeit to much less public attention as the original press release. (Look it up for yourself.)
Finally, you say "religion can't be proven or disproven by logic, so ostension doesn't apply." Ostension has nothing to do with logic. It means, simply, "to show." The reference to "logic" in our article was an ironic to Sherlock Holmes and, as other readers have rightly pointed out, the apparent disparity between Conan Doyle's belief in Spiritualism and what Holmes may have deduced from the evidence.
And on the climate scientist data...go to NASA. They show the entire solar system is heating up from the sun OR the fact we are entering DENSE space. Nothing mere humans did.
Witherspoon himself wrote an article on the artwork for Leonardo, MIT Press, Feb 2005, Vol. 38, No. 1, pages 12-13. You can read the abstract here: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/leonardo/v038/38.1witherspoon.pdf
Or, for the longer version, it says at the end of the abstract that you can email the author (Bill) here: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) - Hope this helps.
Really thanks for the links!