SCEPCOP Forum

Myth: Parapsychology is a pseudoscience. It claims to be like other scientific disciplines, but it has no core knowledge base, no set of constructs, no set of standard methodologies, and no set of accepted or demonstrable phenomena that all psi researchers would accept.

Fact: In 1969, parapsychology was accepted as an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest scientific organization in the world and the publisher of Science, one of the top-ranked scientific journals. By inclusion in the AAAS, the Parapsychological Association is demonstrably a bona fide scientific discipline. By comparison, not one of the "professional" skeptical organizations, some of which even claim to be engaged in scientific investigation, is an affiliate of the AAAS. Assertions about the lack of core knowledge, constructs, and so on imply that to be scientific, members of a discipline must all agree upon a set of uniform beliefs. That's a quaint view of how science works. Pick up practically any scientific or scholarly journal and you'll quickly find that the researchers are always engaged in vigorous debates and controversies. The moment a discipline collapses into a single set of beliefs, constructs, or even methods, it's no longer science, it's religion. As for "standard methods," many of them are described in this book. (Radin, Dean. Entangled Minds. New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2006. p. 283)

I hope this doesn't come across too rude, as I think deep down you're a rather intelligent person. However, as much as you refer to Dean Radin, one would be led to believe that he is the be all/end-all of scientists. You either are him in disguise or you have your nose up his ass so far you both breath out of the same nostrils. Sorry, just an observation. Nothing reported as absolute "fact" in this e-mail...

Hey there QP. Good to see you.

Parapsychology is a true science and not a pseudoscience as a fact because it uses the scientific method in the exact same fashion as any other 'conventional science.' Parapsychology is, by definition of the word, a science.

While directly testing the existence psi has had some rough spots over the years, it is by and large, if you look at the whole picture, rather repeatable. It could be more solid, but it's far from flimsy. However, we are always getting closer to certain predictor variables and correlates of psi. These correlations, such as sheep-goat effects and the better performance of meditators vs non-meditators, are becoming increasingly replicable, meaning we are getting closer to really understanding how psi works and how to harness it. Which is really the most important thing.

That's my understanding as well. The sheep-goat effect was suggested to explain why tightening controls leads to a loss of evidence for psi.

As NucleicAcid points out there is a difference between the method of collecting data and the results. The experiments end up accepting the null hypothesis, which is that there is no evidence for anything happening that cannot be explained by chance.