Divinity Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
You can send evidence on some of these. A pilot is open on 55 questions in one field, Palaeography. Each says what would resolve it; send something that meets that bar, with a source anybody can check, and an editor will weigh it. Sending evidence does not guarantee the question will be resolved, and it does not have to be your field to read what is being asked. See what is open.
Grouped by the shape of the gap rather than its subject: what sort of thing is unresolved.
Filter By Specialty 99 fields, 1 selected
Showing 1 of 608 questions, filtered to 1 specialty.
Measurement 1
A quantity nobody has pinned down closely enough to settle the matter.
Apparitions and Crisis Apparitions
Would the Census of Hallucinations' coincidence rate for crisis apparitions survive a prospective, controlled test rather than retrospective testimony?
Open Apparitions and Crisis Apparitions
Why It Is Open The 1889-1894 Census of Hallucinations argued that apparitions coinciding with a real death occurred more often than chance, but the finding rests entirely on retrospective self report gathered by volunteers approaching people they knew, against a chance baseline its own authors had to construct. No prospective, controlled test of crisis apparitions has been conducted since.
What Would Settle It A prospectively registered study defining in advance what counts as a qualifying apparition and a chance baseline independent of the reporting population, run forward in time rather than reconstructed from memory.
Expertise Needed Statistics; survey methodology; history of psychical research
Question posed in
Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson.