Parapsychology, or psychical research, continues to be viewed by many scientists and laypeople as a pursuit characterized by occult beliefs and pseudoscientific approaches, despite the longstanding efforts of its leaders to operate within the framework of modern scientific methods. This thesis represents an attempt, by examining the 19th-century origins of psychical research, both to understand more fully the reasons for the continued rejection of parapsychology as science and also to define the aim of parapsychology and its potential role in or contribution to modern science in general and psychology in particular. Modern science progressed by rejecting the concept of mental, or "spiritual", causality as a vestige of super-naturalistic, teleological thinking. Scientific psychology was built on the foundation of this rejection of mental causality as an inherently unscientific notion, and as a result psychologists abandoned the field's most basic theoretical problems. Psychical research developed explicitly as an attempt to keep alive, and to develop empirical approaches to, fundamental questions about the nature of mind and its relationship to physical processes, at a time when most psychologists were abandoning such questions as metaphysical or religious problems outside the scope of scientific inquiry. Part I attempts to demonstrate that scientific psychology had its roots in the assumption that mind is a secondary phenomenon derived from matter. In particular, it examines ideas about the relationship of mind and matter in the writings of 11 scientists who were influential in the development of scientific psychology during its formative period, the last half of the 19th century. The essential failure of such scientists to address empirically the problem of the relationship between mental and physical phenomena only further entrenched, and did nothing to resolve, the rift between mind and matter that had led to the rejection of dualism by modern scientists. Part II examines the aims and purposes of 19thcentury psychical research, as represented by its primary spokesman, Frederic W. H. Myers. In contrast to most other scientists, Myers believed that empirical research on the mind-matter problem is not only possible but is the primary task of and challenge to scientific psychology. Chapters in Part II examine the basic purposes and principles behind Myers's work, the theoretical framework and model of mind that he proposed for psychology, and the phenomena and empirical studies that he thought would be most useful in attacking psychology's basic problems. Scientists and others who reject parapsychology do so because they believe that parapsychology represents a reversion to super-naturalistic thinking and would thus undermine the foundations of modern science. Parapsychology, however, undermines not science but the longstanding assumption behind modern science and scientific psychology that mental causality is a supernatural, not scientific, concept. In attempting to examine the assumption that matter is the primary, and mind a secondary, derivative, characteristic of nature, parapsychology reminds scientists that science is most fundamentally a method and not a particular set of assumptions. Myers's primary belief was that that method could be used to push our understanding of mind-matter relations beyond both dualism and materialism toward some new, more comprehensive conception.

Conspiracy theories are an ever more prominent part of modern social and political discourse. While an increasing amount of psychological research has been devoted to investigating the determinants of conspiracism, there is no overarching theoretical perspective that can unify the field's disparate findings . In the present thesis, we develop and test a novel theoretical framework that we call extended monological belief system theory. The theory, based on well-established models of cognitive consistency and parallel constramt satisfaction, proposes that beliefs in conspiracy theories are best understood as fairly vague outward manifestations of broader underlying beliefs and attitudes which together serve to construct a conspiratorial worldview. In a series often empirical studies we demonstrate that contradictory conspiracy theories are correlated in belief, that these correlations are at least partially explained by higher-order beliefs, and that the correlations are not reliably found for conventional explanations; that conspiracists prefer to make arguments based on refuting official narratives rather than proposing specific alternatives; and that interpersonal suspicion appears to be a natural outcome of reading pro-conspiracist persuasive texts. Moreover, connectionist models built on the architecture of the model accurately predicted behavioural responses to fictitious conspiracy scenarios. The results indicate that the degree to which Someone believes in a conspiracy theory is determined less by the details of the theory and more by the degree to which the theory matches that person's higher-order beliefs. Based on these results and on the current state of the literature on the psychology of conspiracism, we propose that extended monological belief system theory can be used as a framework for understanding the contributions of beliefs, attitudes, individual-difference variables, and various other contributors to beliefs in conspiracy theories.

No description available.

This thesis argues that narratives about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) act as the central point of contact between conspiracist and popular millennial fields. Their confluence has come to form a field here termed ‘metaphysical conspiracism’, combining teleological narratives, the promise of soteriological knowledge and the threat of occluded malevolent agencies. I argue that metaphysical conspiracism offers a unique perspective on the interplay of knowledge, power and the construction of the other in contemporary popular discourse. Narratives about UFOs (and their extra-terrestrial occupants) have their roots in the Cold War period, but from the 1980s were increasingly constructed within a supernatural framework. Discourse analysis of popular literature from this period reveals a process of discursive transfer as the UFO narrative is contested and negotiated between conspiracist discourses concerning powerful, hidden agencies and popular millennial discourses of personal and planetary transformation, including ‘New Age’, 'Ascension' and '2012'. Using historical discourse analysis, supported by small-scale ethnographic sampling, I examine this discursive transfer in the work of three popular writers who together offer a broad overview of the field. Whitley Strieber was a central figure in the 'alien abduction' narrative in the 1980s, but his speculations on its meaning led him increasingly towards millennial and conspiratorial narratives. David Icke's well-known theory that a conspiracy of reptilian extraterrestrials has secretly seized control of the planet is demonstrated to have developed in the 1990s from a post-Theosophical narrative of benevolent UFOs as harbingers of the 'New Age'. Although less well-known, David Wilcock's work demonstrates that UFOs were also instrumental in the incorporation of conspiracist material into the recent '2012' millennial narrative. I seek to answer two questions with this thesis. Firstly, what is the common mechanism which facilitates the hybridisation I uncover between conspiracy narratives and popular millennialism? Secondly, how do the resulting metaphysical conspiracist narratives serve their subscribers? Despite a number of structural similarities, I argue that the common mechanism is the mobilisation of counter-epistemic strategies; that is, those predicated upon access to non-falsifiable sources of knowledge. The UFO narrative is particularly well-suited to suggesting sociological uncertainty about the boundaries between scientific and other strategies for the legitimisation of knowledge, encouraging its adoption by both conspiracist and millennial discourses. Secondly, metaphysical conspiracism reconciles the utopian vision of popular millennial discourse with the apocalyptic critique of modern global society announced by conspiracists. I therefore argue that metaphysical conspiracism supplies an effective popular theodicy with a Gnostic flavour in which these millennial prophecies did not ‘fail’, but were prevented from arriving by hidden malevolent others.

No description available.

While the Left Behind Corpus may be commended for being an effective tool for evangelism, the question arises of whether or not its themes engender a theology of extermination, indeed a creeping crusade; “creeping” in the sense of it being a movement of stealth and not one of high visibility – “crusade” in the sense of a militaristic movement, similar to that of the medieval crusades. I span my research across three artefacts in the LB Corpus in terms of its embedded interpretation, discourse and ideology; in fact three separate entities for explanatory purposes, but in effect they form a single entity of interaction and cross-production. I am therefore extending many niches of research and critical discourse to what I envisage as the wider context of the LB Corpus: its potential for social construction, and its enigmatic connections with other apocalyptic-driven and crusade-like movements. Based as it is on “consistent literalism,” the LB Corpus can only be countered by an exegetical approach that situates the foundational text for the Left Behind phenomenon, Revelation 7, in its historical setting, while taking cognisance of the particularities of early Christianity, with its Jewish heritage lived out in a Graeco-Roman environment. In offering an alternative reading, I take some cues from Vernon Robbins‟ socio-rhetorical approach and draw from perspectives of theorists across several disciplinary fields in pointing out anomalies in a consistent literalism driven interpretation of Revelation 7. / New Testament / Thesis (D.Litt. et Phil. (Biblical Studies))

While the Left Behind Corpus may be commended for being an effective tool for evangelism, the question arises of whether or not its themes engender a theology of extermination, indeed a creeping crusade; “creeping” in the sense of it being a movement of stealth and not one of high visibility – “crusade” in the sense of a militaristic movement, similar to that of the medieval crusades. I span my research across three artefacts in the LB Corpus in terms of its embedded interpretation, discourse and ideology; in fact three separate entities for explanatory purposes, but in effect they form a single entity of interaction and cross-production. I am therefore extending many niches of research and critical discourse to what I envisage as the wider context of the LB Corpus: its potential for social construction, and its enigmatic connections with other apocalyptic-driven and crusade-like movements. Based as it is on “consistent literalism,” the LB Corpus can only be countered by an exegetical approach that situates the foundational text for the Left Behind phenomenon, Revelation 7, in its historical setting, while taking cognisance of the particularities of early Christianity, with its Jewish heritage lived out in a Graeco-Roman environment. In offering an alternative reading, I take some cues from Vernon Robbins‟ socio-rhetorical approach and draw from perspectives of theorists across several disciplinary fields in pointing out anomalies in a consistent literalism driven interpretation of Revelation 7. / New Testament / Thesis (D.Litt. et Phil. (Biblical Studies))