Of modern mediums and susceptible psychologists, and of things we do not know

Abstract

Research into psychical phenomena such as telepathy and spiritualism in the 19thcentury was so much hampered by fraudulent mediumship that researchers and the subjects found themselves caught up in what Watzlawick called a ‘pragmatic paradox’, i.e. the only way for a researcher to prove that their medium was ‘real’ consisted in trying to expose them as ‘fakes’. This had consequences for the epistemic claims both parties could make. By the early 20thcentury, both researchers and mediums freed themselves from this paradox and redefined their respective practices as ‘parapsychology’ and ‘performing telepathy’, and simultaneously reconsidered their epistemic claims. In this article, I shall argue that it is necessary to explore the intricate relations between the epistemic claims raised by mediums and researchers, their social identities, and the struggle to appropriate the object of knowledge by both parties, approached here from a social epistemology perspective. I shall try to answer the question why it may have been reasonable for psychical researchers and parapsychologists to not give up on their research endeavors – even when seemingly insurmountable obstacles stood in the way of gaining knowledge – by referring to the concept of ‘perseverance of ignorance’.