JSE 30:3 Editorial

Abstract

Lately I’ve been reviewing the issues concerned with what’s usually called the “super-psi hypothesis.” Very roughly, that hypothesis is the claim that psychic functioning is considerably more extensive and controllable than its seemingly modest experimental manifestations suggest, so much so that it might even play a pervasive role in everyday affairs and operate on a large scale.

I’ve already tackled this topic at some length, in order both to clarify the hypothesis and to evaluate the arguments pro and con (see, e.g., Braude 1997, 2003). Here, I want simply to reconsider a suggestion I made in 1997, and which I now think may be more interesting than I appreciated at the time.

Some like to protest that the super-psi hypothesis is unfalsifiable, because it seems that we can never prove or demonstrate that psychic functioning did not occur, no matter what the evidence turns out to be. If (as proponents of the super-psi hypothesis suggest) our psychic functioning can be sneaky or naughty—that is, if it can be inconspicuous and pervasive and be triggered by unconscious needs and desires, and if we can’t specify clear or useful limits to its degree of magnitude or refinement, then we can’t, strictly speaking, falsify hypotheses positing its operation. So for example, we can never know for certain whether a particular car crash was caused normally or by virtue of somebody’s PK. In the absence of something like a PK meter, the only difference between those two scenarios would be in their unobservable causal histories. (And even if we had a PK meter, we encounter the nagging problem of a regress of confirmation: Whatever we observe happening to the meter could also be the result of operator or onlooker PK—or seemingly random PK from some other source. So how do we determine for certain what caused the meter fluctuations?)