Anyhow, here’s a rather provocative and hilarious article my friend wrote about Ghost Hunting:
http://thingsthatshouldntstillexist.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/01-ghost-hunters/

“Clutching at straws”, or “weak argument” might work, but not in this instance.. Why is this?

Traditionally , psychics pick up from 1) the object’s physical substance, and not from 2) what the object is supposed to represent.

Therefore, the psychic could easily argue that his reading was correct but that that we are all prone to misleading suggestion, directly or indirectly, psychic or not. He could argue that he was misled into 2), above, by a fervent debunker and his contrived artifact.

The psychic can succesfully argue that he reads the object, not the artifact associated with it. He can argue that the object handed to him may well have had a ghost embedded in it EVEN IF he erronously associates the ghost with the image on the object.

Are you saying that, despite being a fake, the photo described above had some ghostly presence in it and that’s what the psychic was reading?

Sounds like you’re grasping at straws…

You’re absolutely correct that the psychic can argue that he still read the picture, and that he sill picked up on some kind of ghostly activity surrounding it. The psychic HAS argued this, and we quote him in our article–so our intention was never to ignore or pretend that that line of reasoning doesn’t exist. However, I disagree that the psychic could “successfully” argue this. To me, this is a weak argument. It’s along the same lines of a psychic doing a reading for an individual person, and, when that person can’t validate any of the claims, the psychic can simply argue that he was actually reading someone else who happened to be in the room.

Psychics seem to be very good at setting things up so that there’s very little chance they could be wrong, and this strikes me more like the behavior of con artists. It would have been very impressive for the psychic in the above article to pick up on the fake ghost. The fact that he read the fake ghost as a real ghost shows me he was taken in. Sure, I could never prove beyond a doubt that the psychic wasn’t reading some ghostly element embedded in the picture, but I find the argument weak, to say the least.

The psychic can succesfully argue that he reads the object, not the artifact associated with it. He can argue that the object handed to him may well have had a ghost embedded in it EVEN IF he erronously associates the ghost with the image on the object.

Researchers need to be more alert about what they claim to have shown.

Are you saying that what the picture is should have no bearing on what the psychic is able to pick up? In other words, if I give a psychic a picture that I claim is from my childhood, and the picture turns out to be professional model shot that came with the frame, it would make no difference because the psychic should be able to “read” the picture, right?

If that is what you’re saying, you are completely missing the point in this particular case. The psychic in this article was handed the picture above and told it was a ghost. The psychic then went on to give detailed information on the ghost. The problem? The ghost WAS A PHONY IMAGE, CREATED BY AN iPHONE APPLICATION. This was not just two different pictures, this was a fake ghost mistaken for a real ghost. You can claim–along with the psychic–that he still read something real from the picture, but that would be insulting our intelligence. Shouldn’t a psychic, who claims to be able to pick up on ghostly images, be able to tell the difference between a FAKE GHOST and a REAL GHOST? Shouldn’t that be the absolute least he could do?

A psychic can, supposedly, pick up ghosts, etc, from any object. The fact that the article was claimed to be a different article to that stated doesn’t make it a different object!

Accordingly, the fact that the article was not what it pretended to be isn’t relevant to the accuracy of any supposed prediction concerning it.

I think the mistake the skeptics make here is a mistake they make all the time. They assume that there is a mooted, and mistken causal relationship between what a psychic supposedly picks up and the article or object that is being investigated.

Sorry lads, better luck next time!