Just want to point out that you have substituted one unknown conclusion, ghosts, for another in your example (unknown particles)
(nitpicking mode engaged) Perhaps you mean an unknown 'cause' or some such. A conclusion is a statement -- a linguistic entity of one sort or another. Ghosts and unknown particles won't be linguistic entities if they exist.
yet you ascribe them different status
Yes. I think that just because the unknown particle and ghosts are both theoretical posits (i.e., 'unknown' in some sense) doesn't mean we need treat them as equally plausible. The general point is easily made: I hereby stipulate the existence of theoretical entity
G, a colony of invisible gnomes. I posit them, consistent with scientific practice, in order to explain an observation: that the universe is expanding rather than contracting. I think that the colony of invisible gnomes are at the boundaries of the universe, utilizing some nefarious gnomish technology to pull the universe apart. Now, is this posit as plausible as dark matter?
Just like dark matter is more plausible than invisible gnome colonies given the corpus of scientific knowledge we've accrued, so too are non-paranormal explanations more plausible than paranormal (ghosts, auras, spirits, etc.) ones. There is literally nothing in what we know of the world to recommend positing ethereal entities and survival after death, and rather a lot to recommend explanations rooted in scientific psychology (especially the voluminous research indicating just how error-prone our cognition and perception is). If this changes, then we can reasonably begin to entertain the possibility of said alternative explanations -- but until then it is mere fantasy.
There are many explanations, the only way to know is one by one check them off via experimentation.
Maybe. If we accept this, we should look at all the experimentation going on and see what it indicates about the plausibility of paranormal explanations.
