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Volume 7: Number 4: Article 5
The "Enemies" of Parapsychology
Robert McConnell, Langley Hall, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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 of 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:
- Healing by self-hypnosis, as opposed to non contact therapeutic touch, may
be normal in an evolutionary sense.
- Psychoneuroimmunology and psi may play complementary roles.
- The principal future importance of parapsychology may be to allow
scientific understanding of psi processes occurring within the human
body.
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