We have decided to add a Glossary of terms to the Psi Encyclopedia. Like other fields of endeavour, psychical research/parapsychology employs many specialized terms. This Glossary is provided to assist with understanding these terms, many of which arise in a variety of contexts in the PE. You’ll find a link to it on the upper menu of the header of our website, between the Links Library and the Contributors page: Glossary – Psi Encyclopedia.
Our Glossary currently includes 223 terms, but more will be added in the coming days. It may be consulted as a resource in its own right, but when terms are used in PE articles, they are marked by underscores at first mention. Mousing over these terms brings up brief definitions along with links to articles and glossaries on other sites where they may be explained in greater detail.
Unfortunately, those links are not active in the floating definition – but if you click on the term rather than mousing over it, you are taken to a page from which you can follow the links. This definition page opens in a new browser tab, so it won’t interfere with your reading. The links given there open in further browser tabs. Simply close the tabs when you’re through with them and resume your reading – no need to use your browser’s “back” button.
The first of the links provided with a term definition is to a PE article that employs it, sometimes an article on that subject. The other links go to other online glossaries with definitions that are sometimes more extensive – those of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the Parapsychology Foundation (PP), the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) and the Journal of Parapsychology (JP). The PF and IGPP glossaries are based on Michael Thalbourne‘s 2003 Glossary of Terms Used in Parapsychology.
Because the PE encompasses the entire field of parapsychology, historically and to the present day, naturally many of the terms in our Glossary are found in other disciplinary glossaries. We have not attempted to supply a comprehensive glossary for the field, though, but rather to focus on terms that appear in PE articles.
We constructed our Glossary with the assistance of ChatGPT, under the instruction of associate editor and AI consultant KM Wehrstein. Chat extracted the major terms from our collection of articles and supplied brief definitions of them, along with links to relevant PE articles and the disciplinary glossaries we specified. Chat arranged this material in the order and in the cvs (comma-separated values) format needed for import into the WordPress plugin we are using (CM Tooltip Glossary Pro). When the Glossary was uploaded, I edited what Chat had supplied, so what you see is the result of a collaboration between Chat and me.
If you have comments on the Glossary or suggestions for terms to be included in it, please comment on one of the social media sites on which this blog is posted or write to me at [email protected].
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For those interested in the details of Wehstein’s conversation with Chat about the Glossary construction, see here.
James G Matlock, General Editor