Another problem for FC: pseudoscientific fallacies about science
Proponents of FC, naturally, take umbrage at being called pseudoscientific. Many believe that they have science on their side and that it is we, the skeptics, who are denying scientific reality.
After all, a couple of studies involving high-tech equipment—eye tracking devices and accelerometers—purportedly show evidence that it is FCed individuals, and not their facilitators, who are directing the facilitated messages. And a researcher at Cambridge University hopes to use EEG readings to show that non-speaking individuals with autism comprehend more language than we think they do. But these endeavors are either extremely problematic or extremely preliminary (“we are developing methods to study language abilities in children with Autism who do not speak”, as opposed to “we have developed methods that demonstrate specific language abilities in children with Autism who do not speak”). Despite this, FC proponents cite such approaches as more “objective” and “scientifically advanced” ways to establish authorship than those pesky, low-tech message-passing tests that date back decades (and that, incidentally, generally haven’t delivered the kinds of results that FC proponents are hoping for).
In fact, neither eye-trackers nor accelerometers nor EEG readings come close to telling us who is authoring the messages that are generated via FC. Until we have instruments that read people’s thoughts directly from their brains while they’re being FCed—i.e., any messages they may be intending to communicate— the only way to know whether facilitated communications are authentic is through tests that blind the facilitators. That is, old fashioned, rigorous, message-passing tests. The fact that these tests involve physical barriers and/or blindfolds rather than high-tech scanners and sophisticated software does not subtract from their objectivity and accuracy.
In terms of objectivity, accuracy, and other scientific goals, the claims of FC proponents to have science on their side involve four fatal fallacies:
The high-tech objectivity fallacy: the assumption that high tech tools guarantee more objective results than low tech tools do.
The high-tech precision fallacy: the assumption that high tech tools guarantee more precision than low tech tools do.
Circular reasoning: the use of messages extracted by FC as evidence for FC (as in, I know it’s him because he tells me so; She tells me her brain doesn’t control her body and that therefore this is the only way she can reliably communicate).
Begging the question: treating “explaining why it works” as more scientific, and more scientifically open-minded, than “exploring whether it works.”
In addition, in some of their claims about the nature of autism, FC proponents have resorted to statements that do not qualify as even possibly scientific.
That’s because science is founded on a combination of predictive power and falsifiability [1]. Claims that qualify as potentially scientific—i.e., as hypotheses worthy of scientific investigation—are those that make measurable predictions and, relatedly, can potentially be disproved through experimental tests. Thus, Russian hackers have created spyware that cannot be detected by any scientific instruments is an untestable claim. There’s no way to show that it’s either true or false. For this reason alone, it’s an inherently unscientific hypothesis.
The same goes for:
Everything you perceive is an illusion.
and:
Every thought you have is illogical.
And the same goes for:
All observable behavior in minimally-speaking autism is the result of a mind-body disconnect that therefore tells us nothing about what’s going on in the minds of minimally-speaking autistic people.
and:
Message-passing tests tell us nothing about the communicative capabilities of individuals with autism because the message-passing testing environment totally undermines their performance.
On the other hand, this statement is a testable hypothesis:
Rigorous message-passing tests will show that most messages generated by Spelling to Communicate and Rapid Prompting Method (S2C and RPM) are not being generated by the person being facilitated.
The question is, why do no S2C and RPM practitioners want this hypothesis to be tested? And why do all of them tell family members not to test it?
Might they, however scientifically minded they think they are, be prioritizing something other than scientific inquiry?
[1] Some philosophers of science have argued that some versions of “falsifiability” are problematic (see here), but in empirical fields, falsifiability, as in testability, is accepted as a general standard for what counts as a scientific hypothesis.
