Abstract: Observing the Human as Human – Jacob W. Glazier

Observation occupies a precarious place in scientific investigation. This is due, in part, to the researcher being the one who is observing, and, given the nature of parapsychological investigation, that which is observed is often another human. Such a reflective, paradoxical nature is captured nicely when Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968) writes, “Since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees. There is a fundamental narcissism of all vision” (p. 139). Observation, in this regard, is best understood from the vantage point of human science.

 A human science paradigm does not just rest on the qualitative side of the quantitative/qualitative methods distinction. Instead, it is an entirely different way of relating to and “seeing” participants, data, and phenomena uniquely and as they truly are. Often contrasted with the natural sciences in terms of focusing on the human, as the name itself indicates, the perspective places serious philosophical weight on the fact that any science must take as its starting point that it is, first and foremost, a human activity and that this fact has heavy ethical and conceptual implications that flow from it. Natural science approaches reduce what they study into smaller constituent parts—in the case of the human, these are the infrahuman elements that are subject to investigation, including the biochemical, mechanical, genetic, and so on (Aanstoos, 2026). In fact, all of the social sciences started by importing their understanding of science from the natural sciences, which means conceptualizing the human reductively “as a node in a chain of mechanistic, causal, or extrinsic relationships” (Aanstoos, 2026, p. 242). Envisioning the human through natural science, in any of the social sciences, assumes that the human, or the psyche, is just one more natural event governed by cause-and-effect relationships (Churchill & Fisher-Smith, 2026). As such, before even getting off the ground, natural sciences assume the thesis of naturalism, whether studying phenomena like thunderstorms or medical conditions, which is undoubtedly helpful in some regards; however, when used to study the human, natural science overlooks important facets of meaning, relationality, morality, and other human-centered concerns.

Progenating the phenomenological tradition, a precursor to human science, Husserl (1970) began by bracketing this naturalistic assumption. In so doing, the hope was the return to the phenomena themselves, as they appear without assumption or presupposition, without this naturalistic framework already in place. Moreover, Dilthey was likewise advocating for the creation of a new human form of science based on Geist, which translates as “spirit,” and this approach “would be based upon compassionate understanding as its primary mode of access to meanings (rather than mechanisms)” (Churchill & Fisher-Smith, 2026, p. 78). Such an approach to science admits that the data collected is always going to be incomplete and, as a result, encourages cultivating an embodied presence that listens in solicitude and invites elaboration (Churchill & Fisher-Smith, 2026). This means listening and observing with our entire embodied consciousness, not just observing what is measurable or that can be subject to rational control using, for example, numbers and statistical analyses. Such a mode of observing is what Finlay (2005) called reflexive embodied empathy, which is not merely emotional knowing but, rather, is a “felt, embodied, intersubjective experience… that underpins researchers’ ability to understand their participants” (p. 272). As a result, researchers should learn to be in touch with the way that they respond in an embodied way to their participants. The author delineates three layers of this reflexive embodied empathy that include connecting-of, acting-into, and merging-with, which interpenetrate one another and where different dimensions of the experience reveal themselves. Human science is a broad framework that encourages similar research strategies, including feminist objectivity (Harding, 1992), understanding how knowledge is situated (Haraway, 1988), reflexivity (Finlay, 2002), the role of metaphor and narrative in science (Hermans & Hermans-Jansen, 2001), and the necessity of hermeneutics in knowledge production (Josselson, 2004; Rennie, 2007).

 Of course, qualitative work in parapsychology is valuable and important, even though qualitative work in the field has lagged in advancing when compared to the other social sciences (Kruth, 2015). Human science research, more broadly and importantly than mere qualitative methods, brings forward a very careful, attuned, intersubjective, embodied, and participatory paradigm of research that is often overlooked in parapsychology. Such a paradigm does not just add onto quantitative work by including mixed-methods research as an adjunct, given that researchers often fail to see the philosophical incommensurability regarding this kind of approach (Wiggins, 2011). Instead, the point is that human science research calls upon the researcher to understand themselves as implicated in important and undeniable ways with what they study. Reflexive embodied empathy (Finlay, 2005), as well as other human science research protocols, could aid parapsychologists in understanding the role of emotionality, intuition, and felt-sense in their investigations (for more on the latter point of felt-sense, see Gendlin, 2007). Excellent qualitative and phenomenological work has already been done in parapsychology that resonates with human science research both historically (Greyson, 2000; Hufford, 1989; White, 1997) and more contemporarily (Ait Melloul et al., 2024; Mondragón-Benítez et al., 2026; Turnbull, 2024). Future parapsychologists can carry this mantle forward by envisioning parapsychology as a human science, reminding us that observation of psi is always mediated through what it means to be human—careful, deliberate, and ethical considerations arise from this fact and should inform research.