The Society for Psychical Research’s
Annual Report and Accounts for the year 2020-21 were published in late July
2022. As it has been some time since I
addressed the vexed issue of the awarding of £78,000 by the SPR to Dr David
Rousseau in March 2014 for the task of providing six papers and a book, I
thought it worth providing an update, as remarkably the matter is still
unresolved. The money came from the late
Nigel Buckmaster’s extremely generous bequest to the SPR, and the lack of
progress of this project is always recorded in the Annual Report.
The relevant section of the Buckmaster
Committee report in the 2020-21 Annual Report says: ‘The delayed Systems
Methodology for Exploratory Science project under Dr David Rousseau is finally
nearing completion but has encountered yet another delay due to family reasons.
The remaining and final product of this project is a practical handbook for
applying Systems Methodology to the problems of psychical research, and this is
now expected early in 2022.’ That early 2022
deadline, like so many before it, was missed.
‘Delayed’ is putting it very mildly. In fact, this matter has been going on for so
long, a significant proportion of the SPR’s present Council were not on it when
the award was made and are probably unaware of how much money is involved. SPR members will certainly not realise it
from reading the annual Buckmaster Committee report.
The first Buckmaster report appeared in
the 2013-14 Annual Report, and the relevant paragraph merely stated that a
component of the ‘Buckmaster project’ was: ‘a research and publication project
to develop Systems Methodology as a new tool especially suited to the
investigation of spontaneous cases.’
Annual Reports since then have provided excuses for work not completed
and revised delivery dates which were ignored.
Finally, however, last year’s Annual
Report, for 2019-20, announced some good news:
‘After previous delays, the Systems
Methodology for Exploratory Science project under Dr David Rousseau made good
progress over the past year. All six of the planned publications are now
finished and five have been published with the sixth about to be published.
These deal with various topics including the fundamentals of Systems
Methodology, reconciling spirituality and natural science, and using Systems
Methodology to reconcile differing world views. The final product of this project
is a practical handbook for applying Systems Methodology to the problems of
psychical research, and this is underway and expected early in 2021.’
So, on paper it looked like finally
significant progress had been made, apart from that niggling handbook. Unfortunately, none of the contracted papers
has yet made it to the SPR library. Despite
having been assured of their competition, we do not know what the titles are,
nor how relevant they are to psychical research, and we are still unable to
judge whether or not the Society has received value for its (considerable)
money.
Hoping to get an idea of what the six
published papers might be, I looked at Dr Rousseau’s Centre for Systems
Philosophy (CSP) website as it has a bibliography. The first thing I noticed is that, despite
listing the various organisations with which he is associated, he does not
mention being a Council member of the SPR.
One would have expected acknowledgement of an organisation that has been
so good to him, but perhaps he does not consider the association to be
advantageous professionally. It is a
sentiment sadly shared by some psychical researchers, though it is less common
than it used to be.
Scanning the bibliography, it is not easy
to work out which essays might fulfil the criteria for the Buckmaster
contract. I can see nothing specifically
related to psychical research and systems philosophy. It is possible the Buckmaster essays
have not been listed in Dr Rousseau’s bibliography because they are SPR property,
but there would be nothing legally to prevent them being included in a list of
publications.
There are
some essays on spirituality, a topic referred to in the 2019-20 Annual Report,
and these may be the ‘planned publications.’
If they are the items in question, they would need a strong
justification to demonstrate their relevance to psychical research. Nobody will grumble that the scope has been
extended from spontaneous cases, as originally announced in 2014, but what we
get does need to be applicable to psychical research, not vaguely about
‘spirituality’.
After all, the entire project was posited
on the basis it would use systems methodology to develop new approaches in
psychical research; what these might be currently remains a mystery. Some of the essay topics alluded to in the
2019-20 Report sound generic and not produced with the SPR solely in mind. Writing about ‘the fundamentals of Systems
Methodology’ and ‘using Systems Methodology to reconcile differing world views’
sounds the sort of thing Dr Rousseau would be doing anyway as a systems
methodologist. Perhaps the handbook will
make it all clearer, once we see it.
Never having been a fan of the proposal to
sink £78,000 into this endeavour, I especially thought it a bad idea to pay the
money upfront in three tranches, and not on production of results. As evidence of the incentive the prospect of
getting paid generates, it is worth noting that Dr Rousseau’s painfully slow
progress on the Buckmaster work was not matched by the speedy production of the
essay he co-wrote with his wife, Julie Rousseau (calling herself Julie
Billingham), for the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies’ 2021 essay
competition.
The result, What would
have to be true about the world? On evidence for the possibility of
consciousness surviving death, was a $50,000 runner-up, and unlike the
essays for which the SPR has paid it is easily identifiable in Rousseau’s CSP
website bibliography. He should really
have allocated the time he spent on the Bigelow entry to fulfilling his
existing well-remunerated and long overdue commitment to the SPR, rather than
the best part of a decade it has so far taken.
This unsatisfactory situation really needs to be wrapped up
after so many years. If all the outputs
cannot be produced immediately, and their relevance to psychical research
firmly demonstrated, there are grounds for clawing back the money; in practice,
though, it is hard to see this happening considering the relaxed way the affair
has been handled.
Update 9 March 2023:
Systems Methodology for Spontaneous Case
Analysis Revealed!
I finally received the last of the six
essays from the chair of the Buckmaster Committee on 27 February 2023. No reason was given why it took so long to
make them all available, when according to the 2019-20 Annual Report they had
been completed at some point before the end of September 2020. Presumably the failure to publish the final
essay, ostensibly on grounds of its length, was part of the explanation.
Having achieved my goal, after so long, of
having the essays in my hands, I thought it worth checking to see whether the
SPR has received value for money. This
analysis applies only to the essays as there is no word on the accompanying
manual, which is still awaited. The essays in question are as follows (essay
number two exists in two versions, so there are seven items):
1 Rousseau, David. ‘Reconciling
Spirituality with the Natural Sciences: A Systems-Philosophical Perspective’. Journal for the Study of Spirituality,
Vol. 4 No. 2, 2014, pp. 174-188. (Available in Taylor & Francis Online)
2a Rousseau, David. ‘Three General Systems
Principles and Their Derivation: Insights from the Philosophy of Science
Applied to Systems Concepts’, in A.M. Madni et al. (eds.), Disciplinary Convergence in Systems Engineering Research, New York:
Singer, 2018, pp. 665-681. (Available on the Springer website)
2b Rousseau, David. ‘Strategies for
Discovering Scientific Systems Principles’, Systems
Research and Behavioral Science, Vol. 34, 2017, pp. 527–536, (available in
the Wiley online library).
3 Rousseau, David, Billingham, Julie and
Calvo-Amodio Javier, ‘Systemic Semantics: A Systems Approach to Building
Ontologies and Concept Maps’, Systems,
Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 1–24. 2018. (Available on the Systems journal website).
4 Rousseau, David and Billingham, Julie
(2018). ‘A Systemic Framework for Exploring Worldviews and its Generalization
as a Multi-Purpose Inquiry Framework’, Systems,
Vol. 6, Issue 3, pp. 1–20. (Available on the Systems journal website).
5 Rousseau, David. (2015). ‘Anomalous
Cognition and the Case for Mind-Body Dualism’. In E. C. May & S. B. Marwaha
(Eds.), Extrasensory Perception: Support,
Skepticism, and Science [2 volumes]. Vol. II Ch. 13, pp. 271–304. Santa
Barbara, CA: Praeger.
6 Rousseau, David and Billingham, Julie.
‘A Systems Philosophy Perspective on the Architecture of Reality’, unpublished,
2022 (but on Systems-headed paper).
Each item is stamped with the SPR logo and
the words ‘SPR Library Copy: Buckmaster Fund Project Systems Methodology for
Spontaneous Case Analysis’. So how often
are psychical research and parapsychology mentioned in the articles?
1 Mentions parapsychology once, in a
reference – the title of an essay by William Braud, referred to in passing in a
footnote.
2a/b Mentions neither.
3 Mentions neither.
4 Mentions neither.
5 Both mentioned numerous times.
6 Mentions neither.
The references to psychical research, and
the SPR, in the fifth paper are unsurprising as this is the one item that has
an obvious relevance to the subject.
Despite the project title being ‘Systems Methodology for Spontaneous
Case Analysis’, references to spontaneous cases in the essays are conspicuous
by their absence.
What about funding declarations? Surely this would be the opportunity to
acknowledge the support for these articles provided by the SPR? Below are the full statements of funding,
where supplied.
1 No funding declaration.
2a/b ‘Financial and material support for
the project was provided by the Centre for Systems Philosophy and by the
University of Hull’s Centre for Systems Studies.’
3/4: ‘Financial and material support for the
project was provided by the Centre for Systems Philosophy, INCOSE and the
University of Hull’s Centre for Systems Studies.’
5 No funding declaration.
6 ‘: We are grateful for financial and
material support provided by the Centre for Systems Philosophy, Oregon State
University, the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), and the
Systems Science Working Group (SSWG) of the International Council on Systems
Engineering (INCOSE).
There is no reference whatsoever to the
SPR. I'm disappointed that despite the
substantial amount of money Rousseau received for these efforts from the Society,
he did not have the courtesy to acknowledge its contribution in any of these
articles, as one would normally expect the recipient of funds to do. Gratitude seems to have been in short supply.
It was also my assumption the SPR would
hold the copyright on Rousseau’s Buckmaster outputs, for which he was being
generously compensated. Yet three of the
essays show the copyright being held by the publisher, the open access journal Systems assigns the copyright to the
authors, and the authors claim the copyright of the final, unpublished, paper.
Payment was made directly from the SPR’s Buckmaster
fund, not via its Research Grants Committee as would have been usual, though
Rousseau was given a sum far in excess of the typical grant. In effect then he was paid as a contractor,
not the recipient of a grant. In that
case, one would expect the SPR to have bought the results and be able to
determine the use made of them.
Instead, the bulk of the papers can be
accessed through the publishers’ websites.
Both volumes of Extrasensory Perception:
Support, Skepticism, and Science, the second containing Rousseau’s essay,
can already be found in the SPR’s Vernon Mews library. Basically, then, all the SPR has to show for
its outlay are copies of papers bearing the SPR logo and a Buckmaster stamp. For £78,000 one might have expected something
a little more exclusive.
Presumably the handbook at least will be
the SPR's copyright, but who knows when it will see the light of day. During my efforts to winkle the outputs from
the Buckmaster Committee I jokingly likened it to the Key to All Mythologies in Middlemarch,
it was so long awaited, adding Casaubon died before he finished it so hoped the
parallel wasn't precise. I didn’t like
to say that Dorothea deemed the Key
to be of no value, and Casaubon’s efforts a waste.
The seven digital files have been sent to
the SPR librarian in London, and sets of hard copies will eventually be lodged
in the library and the SPR archive housed at Cambridge University Library. These will be available to visitors. Alternatively, readers with access can simply
download PDFs of the majority of them.
Looking at Rousseau’s website, he has
written or co-written a number of papers on similar themes, and those submitted
to fulfil the Buckmaster contract seem to be an arbitrary subset of his output,
as if randomly chopped out from his systems methodology sausage machine and
sent over to satisfy the contract. Why these
were selected is nowhere made clear, nor in what way they were considered to be
particularly relevant to psychical research.
There is nothing I can see to justify the money paid for them.
Let's hope my scepticism is misplaced and
these essays plus the handbook will constitute the important contribution to
the progress of psychical research we were led to believe they would be. If anyone can suggest ways these articles may
be utilised in the pursuit of psychical research (for example in the form of
citations), I would be very pleased to hear from them, because at the moment it
is difficult to see how, apart from a single book chapter, they will contribute
to its progress.
Perhaps that is why, in his relationship
with the SPR, Rousseau has kept a low profile, not referring to the association
in his published work, and not engaging with the psychical research community
to test his ideas. It may or may or may
not be significant that he has so far not been deemed of sufficient importance
to merit an entry in the SPR’s Psi
Encyclopedia, although it contains
a large number of biographies.
Sadly, it looks like, having released an
arbitrary selection of articles after almost a decade, he has remained silent
about their significance because there is none, at least not for psychical
research. When one thinks what good
nearly £80,000 could do in a field notoriously strapped for cash, it seems a
shame this is how it was spent. Those
who supported the payout of so much for so little really should feel
embarrassed.
