Essay: The best argument against parapsychology

Academic parapsychology project

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• The best argument for parapsychology

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This page in a nutshell: Parapsychology has failed to advance very far as a science or produce inventions or theoretical understanding of its phenomena. This makes it similar to known pseudosciences.

Critics of parapsychology make many excellent points. Some of them are highly technical, while others are as simple as pointing out that parapsychologists don't know what the heck they are studying. However it is a fact that there are very few critics with the credentials and specialized knowledge to speak about parapsychology. The credentials of parapsychologists such as Dean Radin, Rupert Sheldrake and Charles Tart are matched by those of James Alcock, Richard Wiseman, and Ray Hyman. But if you compare doctorate for doctorate (with the caveat that the person must have actually studied the field), there are far more highly credentialed parapsychologists than critics. Also, the tone of criticism becomes less vehement the more educated the skeptic is. The rhetoric of James Alcock is much less militant than the rhetoric of James Randi, even though both share the position that parapsychologists are scientists who study nothing and make no progress.

So what is the layman to do? You can't really follow the technical debate. It is pretty hard even to get to the bottom of conflicting claims about such things as whether magicians can really reproduce psychic phenomena under the conditions that psychics are reported to produce them (although magicians sometimes say they cannot). So again, as with the best argument for parapsychology, you have to look at the big picture.

People used to believe that the earth was flat. When scientists said otherwise, the scientists were persecuted. People used to believe in "bad humours" that caused sickness, and that a loving God was sitting up in Heaven and would send you to Hell for eternity if you gave in to lust, or that the stars dictated our destiny- oops, a lot of people still believe those. Well, anyway, the list of superstitions which science has conclusively proven wrong —to the open-minded— could go on for many book-lengths.

Whenever superstition clothes itself in scientific language, it becomes a pseudoscience. Typically, its history will be marked by continued attempts to legitimize itself, none of which garner much serious attention from mainstream science. Though it may survive as a discipline —as with Astrology— it will be marked by a distinct lack of progress, both in theory and practice.

The absolute truth is that parapsychology has been going on for a very long time now, and it has very little to show for it. Parapsychologists started out before the invention of the airplane and the typewriter, when people still used the abacus, and magnetism and electricity were interesting. While other sciences have progressed and put men on the moon and a computer in every home (at least every home that matters), parapsychology is still stuck trying to prove to the rest of science that it is studying something. In this respect, it is right in there with Astrology. If parapsychology was really about anything, we should all be telepaths, and airplanes should fly by the power of the pilot's mind. Of course, maybe they can. What are they doing at Area 51?

In a big way, whether or not you believe parapsychology has anything to study hinges on whether you, personally, have had one of those experiences which no stretch of the imagination can explain away as delusion, trickery, false memory, or any other skeptical explanation. Many people report such experiences. Most do not. If you have not had such an experience, it is easy to be derisive about the paranormal.

The judgment is also dependent on your subjective sense of how far science has progressed relative to the distance it has to go. If you think humankind has discovered the basic factors in the universe, then parapsychology is probably chasing the wind. If you think we have a long way to go, then who knows what strange illusive phenomena might tease us for centuries before showing their reality. The truth is out there. Somewhere.