Categories or Degrees of Existence (Agnosticism)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Wednesday, February 24, 2010, 23:24 (5385 days ago) @ dhw

dhw writes: "Thanks to George for drawing our attention to another interesting example of "anecdotal evidence", in this case homeopathy. / 
Like BBella, I know several people who swear by it, and if didn't work at all, the practice would have died out long ago."-The fact that people swear by it doesn't mean it actually works, only that they believe it does.-dhw asks: "However, what interests me in the context of our discussions is how it works if it really is a sham (I don't know enough about it to make a judgement)."-Homeopathy doesn't work. People come to think it does work by erroneous reasoning. They take the medicine and the problem clears up, so they attribute the cure to the medicine, when it probably got better quite naturally. In other cases the problem doesn't clear up, so they try something else.-The idea that people get better because of the psychological effect of their own belief in the efficacy of the medicine is another issue altogether. There does seem to be some truth in this, as experiment shows, but the effect can only work in a very limited range of problems, say where relaxation is an aid to the body's natural processes.

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GPJ