Skepticism about the paranormal: legitimate and illegitimate.

With the growth of belief in the paranormal, skepticism can play a vital role in the scientific appraisal of claims. There are two forms: the first, hardly legitimate, is negative or total skepticism. It is nihilistic and dogmatic, and essentially self-defeating and self-contradictory. The second, a legitimate form, is selective skepticism. Here skepticism operates as a methodological principle of inquiry, testing hypotheses and theories in the light of evidence, but always open to new departures in thought. Skepticism has been applied historically to epistemology, metaphysics, religion, and ethics. The paranormal field has been full of fraud. Here the skeptic insists upon replicable experiments by neutral or skeptical observers before he will accept a claim as confirmed.