Parapsychology

Parapsychology is the study of the evidence involving phenomena where a person seems to affect or to gain information about something through a means not currently explainable within the framework of mainstream, conventional science. Proponents of the existence of these phenomena usually consider them to be a product of unexplained mental abilities.

Criticisms of parapsychological research

• Anecdotal evidence, characteristic of most of parapsychology, is inherently unreliable. Anecdotes may have natural, non-anomalous explanations such as random coincidence, fraud, imagination, or auto-suggestion.
• If an experiment is not controlled to prevent fraud, then the results may not be trusted. This is especially so given the fact that many people who claimed to possess psi abilities were later proven to be frauds.
• Parapsychology experiments are usually poorly designed. They often lack proper controls, allowing paths of intentional or unintentional information leakage through normal means, etc.
• Parapsychology experiments are rarely replicated with positive results at independent laboratories.
• Positive results in psi experiments are so statistically insignificant as to be negligible, i.e. indistinguishable from chance. For example, parapsychology may have a "file drawer" problem where a large percentage of negative results are never published, making positive results appear more significant than they actually are.
• Currently unexplainable positive results of apparently sound experiments do not prove the existence of psi phenomena, i.e., normal explanations may yet be found. Concluding unexplainability from unexplainedness constitutes the well-known fallacy Argument from Ignorance.
• Psi phenomena cannot be accepted as explanation of positive results until there is a widely acceptable theory of how they operate.
• Parapsychologists may prefer and write selective history. The whole story may be avoided.
• Parapsychology spends too much time simply trying to show that certain phenomena occur, and too little time trying to explain them — yet it's explanation that constitutes the heart of scientific enquiry, and wider, scientific acceptance of parapsychological phenomena would come only with the provision of explanation. (See King (2003) cited above.)