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Paranormal Belief and the Avowal of Prior Scepticism

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, Peter.Lamont{at}ed.ac.uk

A common way in which people warrant their belief in the paranormal is by employing an avowal of prior scepticism. That such avowals are used so often, and cited by others as relevant, suggest they are an effective means of warranting not only the facticity of ostensibly paranormal events but also a belief about the paranormal nature of the event. Their function, it is argued, is to head off potential accusations of gullibility or wishful thinking, and they are analogous to avowals of prior belief by `sceptics', which head off potential accusations of narrow-mindedness. However, such avowals also point up key theoretical and methodological problems in current paranormal belief research. Problems of representation and constitution are discussed, and greater stress upon functional aspects of expressions of paranormal belief is suggested.

Key Words: belief • discursive psychology • history • mind-reading • paranormal • psychokinesis • rhetoric • scepticism

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