Normal, Abnormal, Paranormal: Philosophical Determination of a Ufological Lexicon
Thibaut Gress
Limina · 2025
A 2025 philosophical analysis argues that standard UAP vocabulary, 'anomalous,' 'paranormal,' 'unidentified', embeds implicit ontological commitments that predetermine explanatory outcomes before investigation begins, and proposes epistemologically neutral alternatives.
Brief
Thibaut Gress, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Limina (2025), subjects the working lexicon of UAP research to philosophical scrutiny, arguing that terms like 'paranormal' and 'anomalous' are not descriptive but normative, they presuppose a baseline of 'normal' physics against which the phenomenon is judged deviant. The analysis traces how this vocabulary imports explanatory conclusions into the framing stage, foreclosing certain hypotheses before empirical work begins. Gress proposes epistemologically neutral terminological alternatives designed to preserve investigative openness. The paper situates itself within the broader scholarly conversation about how stigma against UAP research is partly a linguistic and institutional artifact rather than a purely evidential verdict.
Metadata
- Category
- Stigma
- Venue
- Limina
- Type
- Peer-reviewed
- Year
- 2025
- Authors
- Thibaut Gress
- Access
- Open access
- Length
- 149.5 K
- Tags
- UAP-stigma, philosophy-of-science, epistemology, lexicon, UAP-studies
Key points
- The term 'paranormal' presupposes a settled account of the 'normal,' treating current physical theory as a complete and closed reference class, an assumption Gress identifies as philosophically unjustified.
- 'Anomalous' functions similarly: it labels phenomena relative to an implicit norm, encoding a negative judgment about explanatory tractability before investigation proceeds.
- The paper argues that ontological commitments embedded in UAP vocabulary contribute structurally to research stigma, because the language itself signals that the subject is outside legitimate scientific inquiry.
- Gress proposes epistemologically neutral terminological alternatives intended to describe phenomena without prejudging whether they are explicable within existing frameworks.
- The analysis connects lexical choices to institutional dynamics: journals, funding bodies, and peer reviewers respond partly to the framing carried by terminology, not only to empirical content.
- The paper is published in Limina, a peer-reviewed venue, itself a marker of incremental institutionalization of UAP studies as a legitimate philosophical and empirical domain.
Most interesting
- The argument applies equally to skeptical and credulous framings: both 'it's paranormal' and 'it's merely anomalous' commit the same error of measuring the phenomenon against an assumed complete physics.
- Gress's critique echoes debates in philosophy of science about the theory-ladenness of observation, a classical problem applied here to the specific institutional context of UAP research.
- The paper appears in Limina, one of a small number of peer-reviewed venues willing to publish rigorous philosophical work on UAP-adjacent topics, reflecting a slow but measurable shift in academic gatekeeping.
- The DOI prefix (10.59661) identifies Limina as a relatively new journal, consistent with the emergence of dedicated scholarly infrastructure for this field post-2020.
- Arguing that 'unidentified' is itself normatively loaded, implying a failure state rather than a description of current epistemic access, is a subtle point with real methodological consequences for how datasets are assembled and filtered.