Confusion worse confounded By Susan Blackmore Commentary on Sheldrake

In Part 1. Sheldrake consistently mixes up the sense of being stared at that derives from the normal senses of vision or hearing, with a putative sense that he claims can operate without normal sensory cues. He might have avoided confusion by giving a name to this proposed paranormal sense, and then made clear, throughout the paper, which he was referring to at different times, but he did not. The reader might try to understand the paper by assuming that when Sheldrake talks about “the sense of being stared at” he always means this proposed paranormal sense, but this is not so; he uses the same phrase to refer to the normal sense. For example, in the opening quotation from Conan Doyle the man looks up to meet the eyes of the person staring at him, implying that the starer was probably visible in peripheral vision.