Author:
Irwin Harvey J.,Dagnall Neil,Drinkwater Kenneth Graham
Abstract
The philosophical school of Evidentialism holds that people should form, amend, and relinquish a belief wholly in accordance with the available evidence for that belief. This paper reviews the extent to which believers in paranormal phenomena respect Evidentialism’s so-called “ethics of belief.” The analysis focuses on several common violations of evidentialist principles, namely, those pertaining to belief formation as a moral issue, belief inflexibility, belief inconsistency, confirmation bias, and disconfirmation effects. Despite some gaps and methodological shortcomings in the available data, the empirical literature documents an association between paranormal beliefs and a broad lack of sympathy with evidentialist ethics, although the effect sizes of these relations typically are small. The possible basis of this characteristic is briefly explored.
Publisher
Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition
Reference162 articles.
1. Ahmad, A. (2020). Belief and ‘religious’ belief. Religious Studies, 56(Special issue 1), 80–94. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412519000234
2. Aiken, S. F. (2015). Evidentialism and the will to believe. Bloomsbury.
3. Alcock, J. E., & Otis, L. P. (1980). Critical thinking and belief in the paranormal. Psychological Reports, 46(2), 479–482. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1980.46.2.479
4. Altemeyer, B. (1996). The authoritarian specter. Harvard University Press.
5. Anglin, S. M. (2016). The psychology of science: Motivated processing of scientific evidence, awareness, and consequences (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Rutgers State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ. https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/51182/record/