The Paranormal Principle of Falsifiability

 What disproves your scientific claims is just as important as what does.  

I was listening to a paranormal podcast recently, and the topic was the manufacturing of evidence.  I didn’t really get their point because they were lumping investigators who mistakenly took natural phenomena for paranormal as perpetrators of fraud.   I didn’t agree with their assessment, and I have stated this point in one of my earlier blogs.  For fraud to happen, there must be intent.

However, I do think investigators unknowingly skew their evidence.  For example, only showing photographs that depict phenomena proving a site is haunted.  An investigator takes a hundred photos, and only one has something remarkable, and that’s the only evidence the investigator submits in their post-investigation report.  I know you cannot make paranormal phenomena happen on demand.  However, under the current Scientific Method, accepted by academia and the scientific community, you must submit all the data you collected.  What disproves your scientific claims is just as important as what does.  

According to the philosophical principle of falsifiability, introduced by philosopher Karl Popper.  You can never definitively prove something is true just by gathering supporting evidence, because a future observation might contradict your conclusion.  Another interpretation of Karl Popper’s principle is that anything can be proven 100% false, but nothing can be proven 100% true.  Under this interpretation, truth becomes a ratio of probability.  

The study of the paranormal is an emerging pseudoscience.   Pseudo means there is an element of belief.  There is a huge difference between truth and belief.  In the scientific community, belief cannot be proven, so it must be considered false.  So, if you take the interpretation of Karl Popper’s principle that truth is just a probability one step further, everything that exists in our natural world is a ratio between truth and belief.  If something is 99.99% true, then the missing .01% must be based on belief and is considered false.

This is the reason why I say to submit everything you collected during an investigation.  Even if you accidentally snap a photo of your shoes, that photo is now considered evidence.  So, as I stated earlier, what doesn’t prove your claims is just as important as what does.