A paranormalist and a skeptic walk into a bar...
How both believers and skeptics make the same mistake
PARANORMALIST: Every night around midnight I hear what sound like footsteps going up and down the stairs in my house. Which is weird because the previous owner of the house, who died tragically, was known to obsessively walk up and down those stairs. I think there is a ghost in my house.
SKEPTIC: That's ridiculous—there’s no ghost in your house. Houses, especially old ones like yours, make all kinds of noises as the wood expands and contracts with changes in temperature and humidity.
PARANORMALIST: Yeah but this happens even on warm summer nights. And it's pretty dry all the time here in Tucson.
SKEPTIC: Yeah but surely there is some physical explanation for those sounds.
PARANORMALIST: Perhaps. But the other weird thing is that the previous owner died tragically on Christmas Eve, and the sounds always get worse closer to Christmas.
SKEPTIC: That's just your cognitive biases at work—you know that the previous owner died on Christmas Eve, so an unconscious process causes you to notice the sounds more near Christmas.
PARANORMALIST: I guess. But surely there's no way to explain why sometimes the sounds are accompanied by a…
This dialogue captures familiar turns in a kind of dispute that seems to erupt perennially between someone purporting to explain something by talking about a ghost, and someone else attempting to debunk that explanation. But in this dialogue, both the skeptic and the paranormalist share the same confusion about ghosts. Rectifying this confusion would fundamentally alter the structure of conversations like these. Or so I shall argue.
Let's dive into it. Early on, the paranormalist reports hearing some spooky sounds, and then posits a ghost as a way of explaining of them. (We could instead interpret the paranormalist as taking the sounds as evidence for a ghost, but I think this paper's argument can be made either way. I'll go with explanation.)
The skeptic then rejects this explanation of the sounds because a different explanation is available for these same sounds. This explanation is given in terms of things like wood, temperature, and humidity. It is an adequate explanation that doesn't mention ghosts at all.
But in replying this way the skeptic seems to have assumed that the following is true: If the sounds are explained by the wood, temperature, etc, then they are not explained by a ghost. (Or perhaps instead the skeptic assumes that one of these explanations must be preferred to the other, and that clearly the preferred explanation doesn't involve ghosts. I think this paper's argument can be made either way, and I'll go with the first formulation.)
Crucially, the paranormalist also seems to have assumed this as they then argue that the sounds are not explained by changes in temperature, humidity, etc. (For the paranormlist wouldn't bother arguing this way unless they had also assumed that, at most, one of these explanations can be accepted.)
The pattern continues. When things get tougher, the paranormalist may add additional details to what they say that the ghost explains (for example, the paranormalist may talk about creepy sounds that also get worse closer to Christmas), such that all the details together are harder for the skeptic to explain. The skeptic may accept these new details and try to explain them, or they may resist them (for example, they may deny that the noises really get worse near Christmas). None of these moves make much sense unless both the paranormalist and the skeptic are assuming that, at most, only one of these explanations of the sounds can be accepted.
But I don't think that the paranormalist should assume this (nor, for that matter, should the skeptic). The paranormalist shouldn't assume this because doing so makes their position less defensible, and they don't need the assumption—accepting ghosts as real doesn't require assuming that the things they explain can't also be explained in other ways. (And the skeptic shouldn't assume this either because arguing against a less defensible view is less interesting.)
In accepting the possibility of both a ghost-based explanation of the creepy noises and an explanation in terms of wood and weather, the paranormalist is treating the relation between these two kinds of explanation as like the relation between other familiar kinds of explanation. Here is an example: I have some onions, and they are finely diced. They are finely diced because that is what the recipe calls for. However, it is also true that they are finely diced because that is how I diced them.
These are two different kinds of explanation. The first explanation answers the question “why are the onions finely diced?” by telling us about the purpose or function of the onions, while the second explanation answers the question by telling us about some cause-and-effect in the onion's history. (Aristotle would call the recipe the final cause, and my knife-work the moving cause.)
But these two kinds of explanation don't rule each other out. Rather than competing with each other, they compliment each other. And there are other examples of non-competing kinds of explanation. Consider these two explanations for my finely dicing the onions: I finely diced the onions because I wanted to prepare a certain recipe. Also, I finely diced the onions because my nerves carried electrical signals from my brain to my muscles, etc, which made them contract, etc, which made the bones in my hands and arms move about the joints, etc, (under the influence of signal sent from my eyes to my brain, etc).
These are two different kinds of explanation. The first one is a psychological explanation, while the second one is a physiological explanation. The first one mentions a psychological state, but no physiological details, while the second one mentions physiological details but no psychological state. We discover (and sometimes refute) these different explanations in different ways: To find out what desire motivated my onion-dicing, you might ask me what I wanted; you might look around the kitchen to see if any recipes were laying around; you might watch me in the kitchen for a few days to see what my habits are; you might ask my friends about me; etc. But you wouldn't do these things if you were trying to find out the physiological causes of my onion-dicing. Instead, the physiological causes have been discovered through measuring and experimenting on bodies. (Whether there is a particular recipe laying out on my counter has nothing to do with how my arms work.)
When the paranormalist accepts the possibility of both a ghost-based explanation of the creepy noises and an explanation in terms of wood and weather, they are merely supposing that these two kinds of explanation don't rule each other out, much as purpose-based explanations and cause-and-effect explanations don't rule each other out; much as psychological explanations and physiological explanations don't rule each other out, etc. And I think it is reasonable to suppose this, in part because (many) ghost-based explanations seem more similar to psychological explanation than to physiological explanation, whereas wood-and-weather explanations are more similar to physiological explanations.
When a person who believes in ghosts tries to determine whether a ghost is responsible for something they have experienced (and, if so, which ghost is responsible), I expect they are likely to inquire into who used to live in that place; whether they were happy for not; what their habits were, what they cared about and wanted most; whether they had any unfinished business; how they saw the world; etc. And these are things that one does when developing a psychological explanation of something. Such biographical details are mostly irrelevant to wood-and-weather explanations, which are instead developed out of the measurements and experiments that have been conducted on certain materials (wood) under a variety of conditions (weather).
Of course, supposing that ghost-based explanations do not rule out wood-and-weather explanations (and vice versa) means moving away from the traditional understanding of paranormal phenomena as things that happen in the normal world, but that cannot be understood through the canonical sciences (eg physics, chemistry, etc). In other words, if we think of paranormal phenomena in the traditional way, then ghost-based explanations and wood-and-weather explanations must rule each other out. But I've argued that the paranormalist (and the skeptic too) is better off supposing that these kinds of explanations are compatible with each other. This is why we should move away from the traditional view about what paranormal phenomena are.
(But, you may now be asking yourself, "WHAT ARE GHOSTS SUPPOSED TO BE THEN!?!" Well, this is what The New Paranormalist is all about discovering. Stay tuned for the next issue, where some consequences of this article will be explored. Carefully exploring these consequences will help us inch our way forward to a reinvented concept of the paranormal.)
Thank you for reading! If you can think of anyone who might find this interesting, please share it with them:
Love it John! Waiting for the next one!