Reinventing the concept of the paranormal
Welcome! I'm John and I'm a PhD candidate in philosophy. Here's why I'm publishing The New Paranormalist.
Lots of people like ghosts. There have been quite a few non-fiction ghost TV shows over the last several years. Some are ghost-hunting shows; some feature people recounting their paranormal experiences; etc. And you don't need to be a believer in the paranormal to enjoy these shows.
But what are ghosts supposed to be? If there are people who have really had paranormal experiences, what are these experiences of? These are the crucial questions that The New Paranormalist tries to answer. I'm interested in these questions because many people, including both committed believers and committed skeptics, seem to have settled on the same answers to them. But the agreed-upon answers aren't great answers.
Partly this is because the agreed-upon answers make debates about ghosts tedious. The skeptic tries to match each piece of alleged evidence to a suitably boring alternative explanation. Psychologists and biologists publish theories about why people believe this stuff. Belief in the paranormal is implicated in intellectual, moral, and civic decline. The believer says something about 'open-mindedness' and usually seems to be on the ropes.
But surely ghosts weren’t always thought about this way. The concept of the paranormal—the concept of a part of the natural world that somehow escapes the understanding of the sciences—seems to be a relatively recent development. (The works of Charles Fort from the 1930s [which it is fair to say do not all make for the smoothest reading] seem to have been an influential articulation of this way of thinking about what would come to be called the `paranormal.' I hope to at some point write a couple of articles on this and other material from the history of the paranormal.)
I think it's time to consider new ways of thinking about the paranormal. What is the paranormal supposed to be? In The New Parnormalist I will develop an original answer that will, I think, sidestep tedious debunking exercises and avoid provoking moral panic. Getting there will be an adventure enjoyable to anyone with a taste for that kind of thing.
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