The CIA reportedly funded a psychic-based program

The argument

Between 1972 and 1995 the CIA operated what is known as "Project Stargate", a program intended to gather intelligence on the Soviets. In it, the United States "recruited men and women claiming to have powers of extrasensory perception (ESP) to help uncover military and domestic intelligence secrets." The recruits were given a wide array of responsibilities, ranging from locating hostages to tracking the paths of escaped convicts. What proponents draw from this is an argument from institutional seriousness rather than from any particular result. Project Stargate was not a brief experiment: it ran for twenty-three years, across many changes of administration, inside an agency whose work is operational rather than speculative and which is not in the habit of funding curiosities. On this reasoning, an organisation of that kind does not sustain a program for more than two decades unless something in it is working, so the persistence of the project is offered as evidence that there is reality in the concept of a psychic. The tasks assigned are treated as supporting the same point. Locating hostages and tracking escaped convicts are concrete assignments with checkable outcomes, not exercises in theory — the sort of work, proponents argue, that would be handed to a capability believed to produce results. The conclusion drawn concerns the standing of the subject rather than any individual practitioner. Those who use ESP and clairvoyance to see the future have, on this view, a history of involvement far more serious than the little hand-reading shops at the side of the road would suggest — a government intelligence program rather than a storefront, which is why proponents treat the dismissal of psychics as a category as too quick.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The only evidence we have of this is one leaked report. There is no evidence of success, no psychics who have come forward to support that this even existed. The government can make mistakes, and maybe this was one of them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That a programme existed establishes what an agency funded, not that the abilities were real — and "claiming to have powers" is the argument's own wording for what the recruits offered. [Rejecting P2] Being assigned tasks measures what was asked of the participants, not whether they succeeded at any of it, and the argument reports no result from twenty-three years of work. [Rejecting P3] Institutions fund things that turn out not to work, especially in an intelligence competition where the cost of ignoring a possibility is judged high. As the counter-argument puts it, governments can be mistaken, and the programme's closure is at least as consistent with its having found nothing.