Firstly, I'm not sure what you mean by evidence. I don't know how testimony is defined in philosophy of science, but according to the dictionary it is considered a type of evidence. If someone claims to have witnessed person A commit the murder of person B, we use this as one of many pieces of evidence to figure out who did it. Perhaps a second person also observed the same murder. Perhaps a knife was found in the culprits room.
It's a starting point which can be used to investigate further.
If thousands if people came forward over hundreds of years with testimony that they had seen a person murder another person and yet no one was ever reported missing and no body was ever found, what use are all those testimonies?
Because that's what you have with poltergeists testimonies. No objectively verifiable evidence has ever been presented that supports the testimonies.
Likewise, if someone witnesses an obect fly on its own, we can use that as evidence in support of a poltergeist.
No you can't.
Otherwise it is also evidence that invisible pink unicorns sometimes carry visible objects in their mouths, or any other infinite number of unsupported nonsense.
At the very most, it is evidence that someone thinks an object flew on it's own. It doesn't point to any cause or mechanism for what made the object fly.... How can you not understand this?
We can also use it as evidence in support of fraud or dissassociative personality disorders. To determine which hypthesis is to be preferred, all we can do is look at more cases.
Again no.
Looking at disparate cases and
presuming a common cause is not scientific... especially when that 'cause' (in this case poltergeists) has never been objectively shown to exist.
If no clear naturalistic explanations appear to remain for any given case, it doesn't prove that the paranormal exists. After all, there can always be unknown factors. However, hypothetically speaking, if we had a million cases that appeared unsolvable, we might want to look deeper.
No. If we had
just one compelling case, we'd want to look deeper.
The higher that pile gets without a single compelling case or a single piece of objectively verifiable evidence being presented, the more likely there is nothing to look deeper in to.
Anyways, what parapsychologists do is take a bunch of cases to act as a representative sample, and look for all the claims that could not be easily explained naturalistically.
Confirmation bias based upon argument from ignorance then.
I am more than aware that it is an argument from ignorance. Than, they looked at peculiar trends within the sample. One of them is that the phenomena focuses on one person most of the time.
Yes, because they've already rejected those that don't.
This suggests that the individual is the cause of the poltergeist.
No it doesn't. No one has yet shown poltergeists exist.
The idea that someone trying to show that poltergeists exist has to assume their conclusion is true in order for their research to be relevant is plain silly circular logic and most unscientific.
Using this, the parapsychologist would create a hypothesis, which is that poltergeists are formed by disturbed individuals using an unknown mechanism.
I'd be really interested to hear of a case where a hypothesis has been thoroughly tested, verified, published and repeated by other independent scientists... where the verified and written up result of testing the hypothesis was that something paranormal had happened.
Or are you also using the term hypothesis to make ghost hunting sound scientific when it's actually not in the same way that UFOlogists dishonestly use the term in their Extra Terrestrial Hypothesis which again isn't a hypothesis at all.
The skeptic can play the same game. They can interpret that result to mean that most poltergeists are frauds, since they require certain individual (s) to be present. Then we repeat the process for other patterns found in the data.
No.
Here it's worth pointing out that there are no two separate groups of people such as paranormalists and sceptics who both have subjective opinions which can be deduced from scientific research.
There are facts and data that are presented and need supporting by the people who present them to show that what is being represented by the facts and data is supports the hypothesis being touted.
The question immediateley rises as to how many samples we need to analyse to form an accurate conclusion.
Just the one will be fine.
Of course the problem being that that one will have to show verifiable objective evidence that supports the hypothesis of poltergeist activity and not just that some people sometime tell stories about poltergeists... we already know that part is true and accurate and verifiable by the number of story books about poltergeist activity available.
My answer would be: not many. All we need is a sample of cases that is representative of the phenomena were looking at.
No one has yet shown there is a 'phenomenon' that goes beyond what we already understand (deception, misperception etc.).
We also want the investigator to have some background knowledge in psychology, biology, sociology, etc. This makes sure that the sample is not tainted by cases that are obvius frauds, or that have obvious explanations.
No it doesn't.
Educated people are fooled just as easily as uneducated people.
If we were to use a sample of cases from someone else, we might not have these safeguards. Now, I never said that any particular authority is better than another (although many believers seem to think Roll is best). Instead, I stated we should be careful in our choice of samples. Take note that this is not an arbitrary judgement into whos more credible. I'm also not discrediting anything you all read. The truth is, I dont know what you've read, so I dont know how credible it is. Surely some books, like those written by Behe, are more credible than others, like those written by Kent Hovind. I really dont think this needs to be elaborated on.
Unless anyone of those people can present verifiable objective evidence, we can dismiss them all as non-credible. The more they dress themselves up as scientists and fail to meet scientific requirements and standards of evidence, the
less credible they become.
Some posters seem to claim that the paranormal has to be understood in the way a normal scientific theory is understood- by having an overlaying theory that explains the replicatable data better than any other competing theory. If not, it can be ruled out a priori. This isn't at all apparant to me.
If philosophical dualism is true, we have no reason to suppose that these spectres would be subject to any scientific experimentation. They would pop in and out of physical reality, so we'd only observe the effects, not the causes. Plus, since the entiries would be non physical, no physical mechanisms could be discovered or even proposed.
This is nothing more than special pleading.
I reject dualism, and think these arguments are arguments from silence. But I cannot use the lack of scientific evidence as proof against their theory, since the theory already accounts for it. It certainly makes the hypothesis look sterile.
If no evidence is presented, the null hypothesis stands.
No one is claiming proof that the paranormal doesn't exist, only that so far it has not been shown to exist and as such, the null hypothesis hasn't been falsified.
Lastly, I am confused by the repeated charge for me to present you with evidence. I am not going to type out, word for word, the entirety of a book like "the poltergeist". All I can do is point out books on the topic that appear more credible than others.
No one is asking you to do that.
Give us one example of the best poltergeist case you know of.
Just the name of the case, a date some basic information will do.
There are some excellent researchers on this forum who will do the rest.
). However, I am not sure why you use this story/evidence dichotomy. Paranormalists offer testimony as evidence of their claims. Testimony is used very often as evidence in day to day life. Keep in mind that paranormalists use testimony from multiple witnesses, sometimes including themselves.
