Psi and Sociologists : J.McClenon's Case

Abstract

From his standpoint of sociology of science J.McClenon, an American sociologist, argued about the present status of parapsychology and showed that the blocks of scientism had obstructed its recognition by the society of elite scientists and that it almost failed to recruit young students to come to parapsychological research. He rather tried to study psi-related and similar experiences with sociological survey researches on university students who lived in China, Japan and USA. The phenomena he studied were de ja vu, ESP, contact with the dead etc. He found that the students experienced every type of these phenomena with rare significant difference of experiential rate among countries and/or cultural environments showing these experiences were unversal. The data, he argued, supported his "Experiential Source Theory" that the experiences for themselves generated people's experiential reports and in its turn influence various traditional folk beliefs as against the "Cultural Source Theory". Then with these ground works he tried to present his own appeal, 'the sociologically real', to compensate the supposedly defective demonstration of experimental parapsychology. Though he had some suggestions from a critic, he surely have contributed much to parapsychological research.