Overview

As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration from 2009 to 2021, Braude used his editorial platform to address what he saw as a pervasive problem in parapsychology: sloppy conceptual thinking and imprecise terminology. His critiques are not directed at experimental methodology or data quality alone, but at the foundational language and concepts through which parapsychologists frame their research questions and interpret their findings.

Braude’s approach is distinctly philosophical. Rather than proposing new experimental designs or statistical methods, he examines the logical structure of parapsychological concepts, traces the history of terminological choices, and identifies where contemporary usage has drifted from clarity into confusion. His work reflects a conviction that conceptual precision is not a luxury but a necessity—that muddled thinking about what psi is, or what counts as evidence for it, undermines the entire enterprise of parapsychological inquiry.

This philosophical stance has made Braude a critical voice within parapsychology, one willing to challenge both skeptics and believers when their reasoning is conceptually flawed. His editorials and essays function as a form of intellectual housekeeping, clearing away accumulated debris so that more rigorous work can proceed.

Defending negative definitions

One of Braude’s most sustained arguments concerns the legitimacy of defining psi phenomena negatively—that is, by reference to what they are not, rather than by positive specification of their nature. Critics have long complained that parapsychology merely labels phenomena without explaining them. To call something “telepathy” is, in this view, simply to say that it cannot be explained by ordinary means, which amounts to no explanation at all.

Braude rejects this criticism as philosophically naive. He argues that negative definitions are substantive and perfectly appropriate given the current state of parapsychological knowledge.¹ To define “telepathy” as “the causal influence of one mind on another independently of the known senses” is not to abandon explanation; it is to specify a genuine phenomenon with testable properties. Such a definition excludes certain possibilities (ordinary sensory mediation) and includes others (direct mind-to-mind influence), thereby constraining what counts as evidence for or against the phenomenon.

Braude notes that philosopher Michael Scriven made this point persuasively in the 1970s: negative definitions can carry substantial explanatory weight by specifying the causal mechanisms that are excluded and the conditions under which the phenomenon occurs.¹ At the present level of ignorance about psi, Braude argues, it would be presumptuous to attempt more detailed, positive definitions. Formal experimental evidence has not yet illuminated what psi is doing in the world, either inside or outside the laboratory. Under such circumstances, defining psi negatively is not a failure of rigor but an appropriate expression of epistemic humility.

Cognition versus interaction

One of Braude’s most important conceptual distinctions is that between telepathic (or clairvoyant) cognition and telepathic (or clairvoyant) interaction. This distinction, which Braude traces to C. D. Broad, has profound implications for how parapsychologists should interpret their evidence and frame their research questions.

Telepathic cognition occurs when a percipient comes to know something about another person’s mental state through paranormal means. In its most robust form, person A would learn what is actually going on in person B’s mind—the specific thoughts, perceptions, or emotions B is experiencing. This is the form of telepathy that raises concerns about mental privacy, as it would allow direct access to another’s inner life.²

Telepathic interaction, by contrast, occurs when one person’s mental state directly influences another’s without the influenced person necessarily knowing anything about the influencer’s role or mental content. For example, if person B’s thought of the Eiffel Tower directly causes person A to think about the Eiffel Tower—without A realizing that B caused this thought or even that B was thinking about the same thing—this would be telepathic interaction, not cognition.²

Braude emphasizes that every instance of telepathic cognition would be an instance of telepathic interaction, but the converse does not hold. The evidence for telepathy, he argues, is seldom (if ever) evidence of cognition. Instead, what parapsychologists typically find is evidence suggesting only interaction—cases in which one person’s mental state influences another’s without the percipient gaining knowledge of the influencer’s causal role or mental content. This distinction is crucial because it reframes what parapsychology is actually studying and what threats or implications psi phenomena pose to concepts like mental privacy.

Common terminological errors

Braude has identified several contemporary terminological practices in parapsychology that he views as seriously misguided. Chief among these is the replacement of traditional psi terminology with what he calls “trendy” alternatives.

One such practice is the substitution of “anomalous cognition” for “ESP” and “anomalous perturbation” for “PK.” Braude has discussed the problems with this approach in great detail, arguing that it introduces new conceptual errors while obscuring important distinctions.³ The term “anomalous cognition,” for instance, presupposes that psi phenomena are fundamentally cognitive in nature—a claim that is neither established nor necessarily true. By replacing the neutral term “ESP” with “anomalous cognition,” researchers smuggle in an unexamined assumption about the nature of the phenomenon.

Similarly problematic, in Braude’s view, is the practice of replacing the traditional vocabulary of psi with a single umbrella term such as “nonlocal awareness” or “nonlocal consciousness.” While the rationale for this move—that traditional terminology may be professionally toxic—is understandable, the strategy commits the same error of failing to accommodate the distinction between cognition and interaction.³ Moreover, the term “nonlocal” itself is often misapplied.

Braude argues that many apparent examples of both ESP and PK are clearly local rather than nonlocal in character. If a psychic healer diagnoses a subtle medical condition of a client seated before them, that is an instance of ESP confined to a small region of space. A successful ganzfeld experiment must be explained in terms of events occurring within the laboratory. When a medium levitates a table or when an experimenter’s hypnotic command causes a nearby person to fall asleep, the causal influence is occurring in a specific, localized region.³ Dubbing such interactions “nonlocal” serves no useful purpose and obscures the actual spatial character of the phenomena.

Another terminological error that Braude has critiqued is the attempt to explicate ESP and PK by treating paranormal influence as a form of action at a distance. While this approach has not dominated recent parapsychological literature, it continues to appear in popular discussions and has been defended by some serious scholars. Braude argues that this framework is fundamentally flawed because it mischaracterizes the spatial properties of psi phenomena and introduces unnecessary conceptual baggage from physics.

Scientific authority and conceptual clarity

Braude’s work on conceptual and terminological issues is inseparable from his broader philosophical concerns about scientific authority, the limits of physics, and the proper scope of scientific explanation. He has argued that parapsychology is hampered not only by terminological confusion but also by naive assumptions about what science can and cannot rule out as possible.

In particular, Braude challenges the claim that contemporary physics or neuroscience has rendered psi phenomena impossible. He argues that there are serious reasons for thinking that no well-supported broad scientific theory—whether quantum physics, relativity, or evolutionary theory—precludes the existence of mental phenomena, normal or paranormal.⁴ Mental phenomena may simply lie outside the domain of physics entirely. Even if theories of perception in psychology described the operation of all known sense modalities, those theories would not be in the business of legislating the full range of possible forms of information acquisition. If evidence leads us to accept previously unacknowledged perceptual modalities, psychology would simply expand its domain.

Moreover, Braude notes that according to influential views in the philosophy of science, many scientific laws are approximations based on ideal cases and oversimplified boundary conditions. They do not strictly apply to real-life situations, which typically involve multiple causes and complex interactions.⁴ In the case of paranormal phenomena, researchers have no clear idea what the relevant boundary conditions might be. This uncertainty is one reason why psi researchers face the notorious “source of psi” problem—the difficulty of determining whether an apparently violated law should be abandoned or whether the law remains useful under different boundary conditions.

Braude’s point is not that science should be credulous about paranormal claims, but that scientific authority is often invoked too confidently and too broadly. Conceptual clarity about what science can and cannot establish is as important as terminological precision about what psi is. Both are necessary for parapsychology to advance as a serious field of inquiry. These debates over conceptual clarity unfold against a sharper challenge to the field’s scientific standing: psychologists Arthur Reber and James Alcock argue that parapsychology’s core claims are incompatible with established scientific principles and that no terminological reform can reconcile them, framing the stakes of Braude’s conceptual project from the opposing side.⁵