This, indeed, is a frequent trap of seeming logic that precludes drawing appropriate conclusions, based on scientific observations and the possibilities of formulating a revised hypothesis in the face of conflicting expectations, when one sees an unexpected result not conforming to the expected behavior and must find a way to explain it away, or revise the hypothesis in such a way as to include it as an extension of what is expected and predicted to happen. In effect, this philosophical approach creates a hidebound set of rules to restrict and confine thinking and limit creativity, particularly in the case of something highly unusual and unexpected that might be observed, and that is the point of doing studies in a controversial area to begin with. To be sure, it is challenging and somewhat disconcerting to leave the nest, so to speak, and attempt to soar when one has untried wings, but to assume flight is impossible because it is simpler to stay on the ground, and all of your life experience shows you everything falls, you will never become airborne that way.
So this is a convenient contrivance, more than anything to do with scientific rigor, as a shortcut to help simplify the challenges a scientist faces in gathering real-world data and making sense of it. That allows them to simply cast aside the unexpected and the complicated, particularly when there is such a complete lack of knowledge about the paranormal to begin with. This leaves a scientist on an island, in a sea of ignorance, and oftentimes they will have nowhere to go intellectually, and that is not only uncomfortable but will likely be rejected as an option. It is far too tempting to simply construct some prosaic explanation to dismiss an outlier, an unexpected unusual occurrence, as having no real meaning, and ascribe it to something like "technical error" or some inherent flaw in the methodology, and skip over it in the summary of the work, and so on.
This keeps science down to earth when, unfortunately, it does need to reach to the heavens to match, in any way, the possibilities, because most of what is important is not physical to begin with but occurs within the Ether, the energetic field beyond the body, and it is only the psychics who can navigate in that space. Science does not have the wherewithal, for the most part, to probe it and make sense of anything, but one must have a desire and enough awareness of the possibilities to begin constructing such experimental methods and capabilities, and you will never get anywhere by having a rule that says, "Always accept the simple and mundane," not requiring something novel to be added to the picture to help explain something unknown.
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