Clairvoyance

This article is about the alleged extrasensory ability. For the album, see Clairvoyance (album). For the book, see Clairvoyance (book).
"Clairvoyant" redirects here. For other uses, see Clairvoyant (disambiguation).

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Diagram by the French esotericist Paul Sédir to explain clairvoyance[1]

Clairvoyance (/klɛərˈvɔɪ.əns/; from French clair 'clear' and voyance 'vision') is the claimed ability to acquire information that would be considered impossible to get through scientifically proven sensations, thus classified as extrasensory perception, or "sixth sense".[2][3] Any person who is claimed to have such ability is said to be a clairvoyant (/klɛərˈvɔɪ.ənt/)[4] ('one who sees clearly').

Claims for the existence of paranormal and psychic abilities such as clairvoyance have not been supported by scientific evidence.[5] Parapsychology explores this possibility, but the existence of the paranormal is not accepted by the scientific community.[6] The scientific community widely considers parapsychology, including the study of clairvoyance, a pseudoscience.[7][8][9][10][11][12]

  1. ^ Paul Sédir (1907). Les Miroirs Magiques (PDF). Librairie Générale des Sciences Occultes (3rd ed.). Paris. p. 22. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 3, 2019.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  2. ^ "clairvoyance". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved February 22, 2022. "Clairvoyance - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary". Archived from the original on February 27, 2012. Retrieved October 6, 2007.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  3. ^ "clairvoyance". Encyclopedia Britannica. Archived from the original on February 18, 2008. Retrieved October 7, 2007. The ESP entry includes clairvoyance.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  4. ^ "clairvoyant". Oxford Learners Dictionaries. Retrieved April 8, 2017.
  5. ^ Carroll, Robert Todd. (2003). "Clairvoyance". Retrieved 2014-04-30.
  6. ^
    • Bunge, Mario. (1983). Treatise on Basic Philosophy: Volume 6: Epistemology & Methodology II: Understanding the World. Springer. p. 226. ISBN 90-277-1635-8 "Despite being several thousand years old, and having attracted a large number of researchers over the past hundred years, we owe no single firm finding to parapsychology: no hard data on telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, or psychokinesis."
    • Stenger, Victor. (1990). Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses. Prometheus Books. p. 166. ISBN 0-87975-575-X "The bottom line is simple: science is based on consensus, and at present a scientific consensus that psychic phenomena exist is still not established."
    • Zechmeister, Eugene; Johnson, James. (1992). Critical Thinking: A Functional Approach. Brooks/Cole Pub. Co. p. 115. ISBN 0534165966 "There exists no good scientific evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena such as ESP. To be acceptable to the scientific community, evidence must be both valid and reliable."
    • Hines, Terence. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. p. 144. ISBN 1-57392-979-4 "It is important to realize that, in one hundred years of parapsychological investigations, there has never been a single adequate demonstration of the reality of any psi phenomenon."
  7. ^ "Dictionary.com "Pseudoscience"". Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved September 22, 2012.
  8. ^ "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy "Science and Pseudo-Science"". Plato.stanford.edu. September 3, 2008. Retrieved September 22, 2012.
  9. ^ "Science Needs to Combat Pseudoscience: A Statement by 32 Russian Scientists and Philosophers". Quackwatch.com. July 17, 1998. Retrieved September 22, 2012.
  10. ^ "International Cultic Studies Association "Science Fiction in Pseudoscience"". Csj.org. Archived from the original on August 12, 2018. Retrieved September 22, 2012.
  11. ^
    • Gross, Paul R; Levitt, Norman; Lewis, Martin W (1996), The Flight from Science and Reason, New York Academy of Sciences, p. 565, ISBN 978-0801856761, The overwhelming majority of scientists consider parapsychology, by whatever name, to be pseudoscience.
    • Friedlander, Michael W (1998), At the Fringes of Science, Westview Press, p. 119, ISBN 978-0-8133-2200-1, Parapsychology has failed to gain general scientific acceptance even for its improved methods and claimed successes, and it is still treated with a lopsided ambivalence among the scientific community. Most scientists write it off as pseudoscience unworthy of their time.
    • Pigliucci, Massimo; Boudry, Maarten (2013), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, University Of Chicago Press, p. 158, hdl:1854/LU-3161824, ISBN 978-0-226-05196-3, Many observers refer to the field as a 'pseudoscience'. When mainstream scientists say that the field of parapsychology is not scientific, they mean that no satisfying naturalistic cause-and-effect explanation for these supposed effects has yet been proposed and that the field's experiments cannot be consistently replicated.
  12. ^ Cordón, Luis A. (2005). Popular Psychology: An Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. p. 182. ISBN 978-0-313-32457-4. The essential problem is that a large portion of the scientific community, including most research psychologists, regards parapsychology as a pseudoscience, due largely to its failure to move beyond null results in the way science usually does. Ordinarily, when experimental evidence fails repeatedly to support a hypothesis, that hypothesis is abandoned. Within parapsychology, however, more than a century of experimentation has failed even to conclusively demonstrate the mere existence of paranormal phenomenon, yet parapsychologists continue to pursue that elusive goal.