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Charles Fort and the Forteans

Charles Fort (1874-1932) was an anti-science skeptic who spent most of his adult life studying newspapers and magazines for accounts of anything mysterious which didn't fit with current scientific theories. He was the author of several books which attacked what he called the "priestcraft" of science. Fort had very few friends, but one of them, Tiffany Thayer, created the Fortean Society to promote and encourage Fort-like attacks on science and scientists. The Forteans are still alive today and still publishing a magazine true to their hero's technique of ridicule and attack to embarrass scientists as much as possible. In 1937, when Fort died he left over 30 boxes of notes. For all I know, the Forteans are still publishing these notes in their magazine.

Though Fort had a passionate distrust of scientists, that did not prevent him from offering his own speculations in cosmology, for example. The speculations bear no resemblance to the truth, nor give any indication of an understanding of empirical research and theory-making. Fort seemed to be one of those radical skeptics of science who think that "anything goes" since scientists make errors and scientific theories are not infallible but tentative and liable to modification, change or outright rejection eventually. Fort had many theories and speculations about natural phenomena. Martin Gardner claims that it is difficult to figure out what to make of all these theories. Was Fort mainly a humorist? Was all his criticism and speculation just one big joke to him? Was he a crackpot, taking his farfetched notions seriously? Did he really believe any of the stuff he put forth? Gardner concludes that Fort was a mad Hegelian! Maybe. But what interests me is not what Fort really was, but rather his extreme and vengeful skepticism towards science. The Forteans are not against speculation or investigation into natural phenomena, i.e., they are not opposed to working within the realm of science. They seem to be opposed to science as it really is: fallible, human, tentative, after probabilities rather than absolute certainties. They seem to think that since science is not infallible, any theory is as good as any other. This is the same kind of misunderstanding of science that we find with so-called "scientific creationists" and other pseudoscientists.


further reading

The Forteans Homepage

The Fort Pages

Gardner, Martin. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, (New Hork: Dover Publications, 1957).


The Skeptic's Dictionary
by
Robert Todd Carroll