What is it about?
A variety of fundamental scientific principles are reviewed among them are the role of causal mechanisms, the laws of thermodynamics, time's arrow, and the inverse square law. Claims of parapsychologists violate all and hence, unless all of science as we understand it is wrong, their claims cannot be true. A secondary element of the paper is to examine why, given this virtual impossibility of parapsychology, researchers continue to believe in it and continue to study it despite the fact that, after 150 years of effort, nothing has ever been unambiguously shown to be true.
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Why is it important?
The important point is to make public the vacuousness of the claims of parapsychologists and to refocus efforts onto "normal" science. There's enough mystery and delight to be wrung from efforts to understand the psychology of perfectly normal effects without wandering away into mysterianism.
Perspectives
I taught courses on a skeptical approach to parapsychology for over twenty years. Recent claims published in one of the flagship journals of the APA concerning the reality of psi effects (as they are often called) spurred me (and my co-author Jim Alcock) to focus our thinking. The best way to address these arguments was, in our minds, to simply point out that they cannot possibly be true and the data that have been put forward are all flawed. "Pigs can't fly" -- hence any evidence that shows they can is flawed in some way. Parapsychological claims cannot be true and any data that suggests it is is, a foriori, flawed.
Arthur Reber
University of British Columbia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Searching for the impossible: Parapsychology’s elusive quest., American Psychologist, June 2019, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/amp0000486.
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