Abstract

Discusses Sheldrake's (1981) book in which he proposes an organicist alternative to vitalism that includes the positing of formative causation. The present author notes that Sheldrake's book has been hailed as a radically new and viable approach to a vast range of scientific issues with a potential bearing on parapsychological theory. It has also been dismissed and strongly denounced as an indefensible eccentric work. The present author attempts to show that both parties are wrong. Sheldrake's theory is flawed because it is mechanistic. Without a mechanism of operation, the positing of morphogenetic fields adds nothing to the regularities they were designed to explain. Morphogenetic fields would merely be a new, and technically imposing, name for old phenomena. Sheldrake holds that different domains demand different methodologies and modes of explanation. Only when the life sciences stop trying to mimic the methods of physics, only when they recognize that there is more than one way to be scientific, will theories adequate to the domains of organic phenomena arise. (7 ref)