### 5.2 Conflicts that should remain open

**First-person certainty versus third-person underdetermination.** A person may experience contact, revelation, possession, or synchronicity with exceptional certainty. Science can document intensity and consequences while finding the external cause underdetermined. Dismissing the experience is unwarranted; treating certainty as independent verification is also unwarranted. **Clinical explanation versus cultural interpretation.** Dissociation, intoxication, psychosis, ritual trance, and spirit possession can share surface descriptions. Clinical assessment focuses on distress, impairment, involuntariness, danger, and differential causes; anthropology focuses on social learning, role, embodiment, and local ontology. Neither should be used as a universal shortcut. **Meaningful outcome versus causal attribution.** A ritual may help someone grieve, decide, focus, or feel accompanied. The outcome can be real even if the user’s preferred explanation—spirit contact, manifestation, model consciousness, or placebo—is unproven. Multiple mechanisms can operate together.