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Philosophy & the Paranormal

Why You Can’t Read My Mind

We had no idea that Paul MacDonald intended to write this article.

Much attention is given in the populist media to explaining the unexplained; every month new books, magazines, and websites devoted to the paranormal make their appearance. In an attempt to counter-balance the prevalent climate of credulity,The Skeptical Inquirer has offered cogent and sober analyses of claims made about alien abductions, after-death communication, Biblical Creationism, and other peculiar pseudo-scientific theories. However, it is rather unusual for paranormal claims to be subjected to explicitly philosophical scrutiny, perhaps partly because it is more common to think that reported incidents are simply highly unlikely, implausible or garbled. But some claims made about some types of paranormal phenomena, such as ghosts, psycho-kinesis, and telepathy are more than just improbable: they are basically confused at the conceptual level. At the same time that cognitive scientists articulate more and more complex materialist theories of the mind, reducing the mental domain to the operations of neuro-chemical computations, paranormalists postulate an immaterial mind with significant occult powers.

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