Psi and the nature of abilities

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Sept, 1992 by Stephen E. Braude

I must emphasize that these different meanings of the term "ability" are not sharp. They merely identify useful points on a continuum of human capacities. In fact, it is relatively easy to find human attributes that seem to fall at various points in between. For example, the ability to stand on one leg is not as elementary a capacity as the ability to swallow or the ability to smile. We should perhaps view it as intermediate between those capacities and athletic ability. Similarly, the ability to discriminate changes in pitch may be intermediate between musical ability and simply being able to hear. Likewise, some human abilities seem to fall between skills, on the one hand, and, on the other, higher-order endowments such as musical, mathematical, and athletic abilities. They are not merely dispositions, however complex; rather, they involve the development of some relatively simple subsidiary skills and a certain amount of self-control. But they need not involve the degree of specific goal-directed self-mastery usually associated with such skills as playing the violin or playing tennis. Into this category we might place, say, the ability to hold a job, cook dinner, and make people feel comfortable. (It should be clear that each of these can be cultivated thoroughly enough to qualify as a skill.)

Despite these subtleties and complications, for present purposes it will be sufficient to distinguish only the three principal senses of "ability" I have roughly delineated. And to help keep them distinct, let us resort to a bit of terminological artificiality and agree to use certain normally fuzzy and elastic expressions as rather specific technical terms. Let us henceforth use the term "capacity" to refer to rudimentary and more or less universal human (or organic) endowments, such as the capacity to hear, or to digest food. Let us use the term "ability" to stand for the higher-level traits or dispositions discussed earlier. And finally, let us reserve "skill" for a fairly specific kind of proficiency--namely, a mastery over certain of one's other organic endowments (abilities or capacities). Hence, skills are exhibited, not only by those who juggle, sculpt, play the French horn, repair automobiles, and solve quadratic equations, but also by yogis who can control their heart rate or body temperature, and by more ordinary folk who have learned to control pain through self-hypnosis.

Armed (or perhaps saddled) with these terminological conventions, we may now make several observations bearing on the data of parapsychology. I have often complained that laboratory research in parapsychology is almost ludicrously premature, because researchers have no idea what sort of organic function they are trying to investigate. Not only are we ignorant of psi's finer-grained features, we do not even know its overall purpose, if any, or its natural history. We do not know whether psychic functioning is an ability (like musical ability) or whether it is a brute endowment such as the capacity to see or to move one's limbs. Obviously, then, we do not know what sort of ability or capacity psi is, and what its function might be outside the lab. But in the absence of such rudimentary knowledge about psi, we can have no idea whether (or to what extent) our experimental procedures are appropriate to the phenomena. After all, we would not examine a person's mechanical aptitude the same way we would investigate his ability to produce witty remarks. Generally speaking, different abilities must be studied in different ways. Similarly, techniques appropriate to studying those abilities will differ from those suitable to examining mere capacities, such as the capacity to blink, swallow, utter sounds, or dream. And, of course, different capacities likewise tend to require distinct modes of investigation.