The "Enemies" of Parapsychology
نویسندگان
چکیده
The author regards as "enemies" of parapsychological research (1) those critics who confuse parapsychology with popular superstition, (2) those parapsychologists who know all the pieces of evidence for the reality of psi effects but who lack the capacity to integrate and to evaluate that evidence as a whole, and (3) those professional psychics whose faltering attempts to apply psi for profit give the field a bad name. The author believes that parapsychology's urgent task is to bring mutual understanding between scientists and the public by exploring the obscure but real psi phenomena that give rise to popular superstition. He sees extrasensory perception and psychokinesis as evocable, operationally-defined psi phenomena. However, he rejects as a religious endeavor the search for logical proof of their reality and advocates, instead, a Bayesian summation of countervailing intuitive probabilities. The author rejects blind empiricism as a practical path to the utilization of psi. He offers several speculations regarding future discoveries in parapsychology, three of which are: (1) Healing by self-hypnosis, as opposed to noncontact therapeutic touch, may be normal in an evolutionary sense. (2) Psychoneuroimmunology and psi may play complementary roles. (3) The principal future importance of parapsychology may be to allow scientific understanding of psi processes occurring within the human body.
منابع مشابه
Evaluating the Evidence for Paranormal Phenomena
Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century is a successor to an earlier Handbook of Parapsychology published 38 years ago (Wolman, 1977). The authors of the present Handbook discuss the relevant empirical, methodological, and conceptual developments that have taken place in the field of parapsychology since then. It is a high-level book written primarily for academic scholars and graduate ...
متن کاملReplication and Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology
Parapsychology, the laboratory study of psychic phenomena, has had its history interwoven with that of statistics. Many of the controversies in parapsychology have focused on statistical issues, and statistical models have played an integral role in the experimental work. Recently, parapsychologists have been using meta-analysis as a tool for synthesizing large bodies of work. This paper presen...
متن کامل[ Letter on Meta - Analysis in Parapsychology
Caroline Watt's (2005) thoughtful and stimulating presidential address to the Parapsychology Association raised several points that could help parapsychology. For example, she pointed out that the proposals in a recent article by me on "A Proposal and Challenge for Proponents and Skeptics of Psi" (Kennedy, 2004a) would enhance the evidential value of meta-analysis. That point is true, but it ma...
متن کاملParapsychology: Science or Pseudo-Science?
Do paranormal or parapsychologicalinvestigationsmeet the criteria often said to characterize pseudo-science? Mainstream and non-mainstream research is compared through content analysis of selected samples of mainstream journals from several fields and of non-mainstream (‘‘fringe’’) journals. Oral communication processes were studied at an annual meeting of the ParapsychologicalAssociation. Thou...
متن کامل