Talk:Parapsychology

Hypnosis

Hypnosis seems noticeably absent from the article. Considering it is the most scientifically accepted form of parapsychology it clearly deserves to be included — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.207.131.31 (talk) 10:45, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

"Tiny"

You can't say "tiny" in an academic article. It's meaningless. Either you say "small", and leave it ambiguous as to how far they are from a strong correlation, or you actually give a measure of the statistical deviation. "tiny" is not a term that you would ever see in a paper presenting statistics so nobody has a reference as to what it means in this context. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.175.102.1 (talk) 01:49, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

We will follow the source in their description. [1] in their book by Oxford University which is sufficient to prove your claim invalid. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 04:58, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Tiny cause with huge impact: polar instability through strong magneto-electric-elastic coupling in bulk EuTiO3. Your argument is invalid. Guy (Help!) 10:21, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Lead sentence

There may be better ways to word the opening sentence, but describing the subject as being "regarded by skeptics as a pseudoscience" is not one of them. Earlier versions of the article called it a "discipline", which might be preferable. --McGeddon (talk) 12:03, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

I would say that in general the lead is not particularly informative, nor does it outline what is contained in the body of the article, as a lead should. Check out what the lead looked like on the day that it received featured article status:

Parapsychology is the study of paranormal events including extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, and survival of consciousness after death. Parapsychological research involves a variety of methods including laboratory research and fieldwork, which is conducted at privately funded laboratories and some universities around the world though there are fewer universities actively sponsoring parapsychological research today than in years past. Experiments conducted by parapsychologists have included the use of pseudorandom number generators to test for evidence of psychokinesis, sensory-deprivation Ganzfeld experiments to test for extrasensory perception, and research trials conducted under contract to the United States government to investigate the possibility of remote viewing. Though recognized as a legitimate scientific field by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, active parapsychologists have admitted difficulty in getting scientists to accept their research, and science educators and scientists have called the subject pseudoscience. Scientists such as Ray Hyman, Stanley Krippner, and James Alcock have criticized both the methods used and the results obtained in parapsychology. Skeptical researchers suggest that methodological flaws, rather than the anomalistic explanations offered by many parapsychologists, provide the best explanation for apparent experimental successes. To date, the scientific community has not accepted evidence of the existence of the paranormal.

It might be helpful to look at the past successes of this article in this case. --Annalisa Ventola _{(Talk | Contribs)} 14:57, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

That version has some problems with due weight, but what it does well is explaining the level of acceptance. Calling the whole field pseudoscience is incorrect, since some researchers do use valid and rigorous methods. What should be emphasized is that the accepted research has not validated the existence of the phenomena under study. Rhoark (talk) 15:49, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

That is like saying that we cannot call the ocean "water" because some of the space has fishes. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 15:54, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Ocean currently defines it as "a body of saline water that composes much of a planet's hydrosphere". If that were to be replaced with just "water", it would indeed be incorrect. Rhoark (talk) 16:14, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

I think there is nothing inherent about pseudoscience that says that researchers who engage in pseudoscience must also necessarily use invalid or less-than-rigorous methods to come to their conclusions. One of the things Richard Wiseman points out is that parapsychologists actually are more rigorous than many psychologists in their statistical approaches to data, but that this just speaks poorly of psychology rather than being an effective apologia for parapsychology. jps (talk) 16:03, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

That's actually the definition of pseudoscience. Rhoark (talk) 16:14, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

No, it isn't. The definition of pseudoscience is "a claim, belief or practice which is incorrectly presented as scientific, but does not adhere to a valid scientific method, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status." There are ways to be pseudoscientific without any consideration of the methods of research whatsoever. jps (talk) 16:31, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

The only part of that which offers an escape is the elastic "lacks scientific status", which if interrogated for a precise meaning will probably not lead to anything other than unscientific methodology. Rhoark (talk) 22:27, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

I think if we want to maintain NPOV then "Parapsychology is the study of..." would be more appropriate, followed by some commentary on the field's limited acceptance by mainstream scientists. Pseudoscience - in addition to it's negative connotation - is also far too specific and excludes the study of the paranormal as it is approached by historians and philosophers. --Annalisa Ventola _{(Talk | Contribs)} 16:48, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Part of the problem with that formulation is that it is possible to study paranormal events without engaging at all in parapsychology. jps (talk) 17:14, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

"is possible" or "would be possible"? I'm not sure what you're getting at. Rhoark (talk) 19:33, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

E.g. many of the people at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry who study paranormal events do not consider themselves parapsychologists. jps (talk) 20:07, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Tough cookies? Rhoark (talk) 20:25, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Or, we can go by what reliable sources say which identify parapsychology as being the aspects which are inclined to pseudoscience. Wikipedia generally prefers to follow reliable sources. jps (talk) 21:09, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Handwaving about what things are "inclined to" is evading the reliable sources, not following them. Reliable sources attest to activities within parapsychology that are pseudoscientific, and activities that are genuinely scientific. The latter include studies with negative results, meta-analyses, studies of deliberate deceptions, and neurological phenomena that are subjectively perceived as supernatural (near-death experiences, hypnosis, blindsight, etc.) Rhoark (talk) 22:36, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Interesting point. The Skeptic's Dictionary says: "Parapsychology is the search for evidence of paranormal phenomena, such as ESP and psychokinesis. Most scientists try to explain observed and observable phenomena. Parapsychologists try to observe unexplainable phenomena." That seems to me to be a pretty accurate and neutral summary, which also identifies why it's pseudoscience. Guy (Help!) 10:30, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Support for the categorization of Parapsychology under the Arbcom's definition of an "Alternative theoretical formulations"

I think editors here might be interested in this call that appeared in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00017/full

This call is signed by over 100 professors at universities, including the current president of the American Statistical Association (Jessica Utts) and several big figures in academia. The content of the article suggests that the major theories in parapsychology may be considered "alternative theoretical formulations which have a following within the scientific community are not pseudoscience, but part of the scientific process."

I hope that editors will re-think their categorization in light of this reference. --Annalisa Ventola _{(Talk | Contribs)} 17:51, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Briefly reviewing that article, it appears that the authors are saying that parapsychology is widely considered pseudoscience, but that (in the author's opinion), it should not be. We should report the widely held view. Many of our sources indicate parapsychology fits this category (yours included, apparently), so that's what we should report. To suggest parapsychology is "a part of the scientific process" in any way would require extensive sourcing.   — Jess· Δ♥ 18:09, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

The link says quite the opposite. It says some topics with present mainstream acceptance (hypnotism, pre-conscious cognition) emerged from parapsychology, and that only a minority of scientists dismiss parapsychology as pseudoscience a priori. Rhoark (talk) 18:22, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

The journal being referenced is not very reliable. E.g., check out this. We need a better source for this dubious claim that only a minority of scientists dismiss parapsychology (a rather audacious claim). Open letters of this sort have also been found to be a feature of other pseudoscience campaigns including creationism, global warming denial, alternative medicine, ufology, and big bang denialism. Looks to me like parapsychology is just following in these well-trodden pseudoscience footsteps. jps (talk) 18:29, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

@Rhoark. The first link I checked of the surveys cited seems to indicate the opposite. [2] - LuckyLouie (talk) 18:34, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

@Rhoark, you're correct. The article says "a clear minority", and I read "majority" while skimming. That's quite a claim, and we'd need better sourcing for it than this one article. Their only citation is wikademia, which lists studies between 1938 and 1982. That certainly doesn't encourage belief that this represents the current opinion of the scientific community.   — Jess· Δ♥ 18:55, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Citing Wikademia(!) is not a good sign for a paper. Yikes! jps (talk) 19:25, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

I think that many of the lessons from Project Steve are applicable here. The sources in the link -- which are the only relevant parts as far as Wikipedia is concerned -- seem less than convincing. For instance considering the failed replications of Bem's "time-traveling porn" thing, citing the Bem paper makes rather the opposite point, doesn't it? It would be better if you directly provided some of the best sources that you believe support your case. Manul ~ talk 20:05, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

• This article is already covered by the arbitration findings on fringe topics / pseudoscience. No other arbitration case is required, I think. Guy (Help!) 22:44, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

I do not think there is an alternative theoretical formulation that has been put forward; it's just a big tent under which one can find both science and pseudoscience. Rhoark (talk) 00:36, 25 June 2015 (UTC

Guy, if you want to talk about ArbCom findings, then I think you will find this one pertinent to our discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Paranormal#Conflation_of_parapsychology_with_unscientific_concepts

Note the language here: "In addition to mainstream science which generally ignores or does not consider the paranormal worthy of investigation, there is a scientific discipline of parapsychology which studies psychic phenomena in a serious scientific way..." --Annalisa Ventola _{(Talk | Contribs)} 01:59, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

That arbcom case is interesting, but also from 7 years ago, and I doubt those statements would still pass today. They are certainly not supported by sources as far as I can tell. Right now, these are the sources we're using for "pseudoscience":

Sources
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Daisie Radner, Michael Radner. (1982). Science and Unreason. Wadsworth. pp. 38-66. ISBN 0-534-01153-5 Paul Kurtz. Is Parapsychology a Science?. In Kendrick Frazier. (1981). Paranormal Borderlands of Science. Prometheus Books. pp. 5-23. ISBN 0-87975-148-7 "If parapsychologists can convince the skeptics, then they will have satisfied an essential criterion of a genuine science: the ability to replicate hypotheses in any and all laboratories and under standard experimental conditions. Until they can do that, their claims will continue to be held suspect by a large body of scientists." Mario Bunge. (1987). Why Parapsychology Cannot Become a Science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10: 576-577. Terence Hines. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. pp. 113-150. ISBN 1-57392-979-4 Michael W. Friedlander. (1998). At the Fringes of Science. Westview Press. p. 119. ISBN 0-8133-2200-6 "Parapsychology has failed to gain general scientific acceptance even for its improved methods and claimed successes, and it is still treated with a lopsided ambivalence among the scientific community. Most scientists write it off as pseudoscience unworthy of their time." Massimo Pigliucci, Maarten Boudry. (2013). Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. University Of Chicago Press p. 158. ISBN 978-0-226-05196-3 "Many observers refer to the field as a "pseudoscience". When mainstream scientists say that the field of parapsychology is not scientific, they mean that no satisfying naturalistic cause-and-effect explanation for these supposed effects has yet been proposed and that the field's experiments cannot be consistently replicated."

Those seem fairly strong, but I have no doubts we could do even better. I see no sources whatsoever describing it as in any way scientific.   — Jess· Δ♥ 13:05, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for providing these sources, Jess. It is useful to understand the basis on which editors here are classifying parapsychology as a pseudoscience. However, have you noticed that all but one of your sources are older than the ArbCom decision above? As for sources describing parapsychology as scientific, I am currently gathering those, but here are three in which the famous skeptic Chris French is on record as saying that his opinion parapsychology is a real science:

French, C. (2009). Anomalistic psychology. In M. Cardwell, L. Clark, C. Meldrum, & A. Wadeley (eds.). Psychology A2 for AQA A. 4th ed. London: Collins. Pp. 472-505. ISBN: 978-0007255047

Holt, N., Simmonds-Moore, C., Luke, D., & French, C. C. (2012). Anomalistic Psychology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapter 5. ISBN: 978-0230301504

French, C. C., & Stone, A. (in press). Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-1403995711

So to summarize, so far I have evidenced 100 university professors publicly legitimizing the field of parapsychology in a mainstream scientific journal, Wikikpedia's on Arbitration Committee describing parapsychology as a science, and one of the most prominent skeptics in the field describing parapsychology as a science. Tell me, what more do you need? --Annalisa Ventola _{(Talk | Contribs)} 17:15, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Can you give links or isbns for your sources, please? The version of Anomalistic Psychology I checked is only 325 pages long, so I can't verify your reference to page 472-505.   — Jess· Δ♥ 17:34, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

My apologies. Links and ISBN #'s added above. --Annalisa Ventola _{(Talk | Contribs)} 17:51, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

• oppose "and then something happens for which we have no explanation nor any repeatable evidence" is not an "alternative theoretical formulation" - its magic. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 02:13, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Especially since in most cases we have a perfectly satisfactory explanation, but the true believers simply refuse to accept it. Guy (Help!) 10:18, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected

I semi-protected this article due to disruptive editing. Our new anonymous friend should propose edits and achieve consensus then use {{editprotected}}. This will help to avoid some of the common newcomers' errors they are making. Guy (Help!) 22:43, 24 June 2015 (UTC)