RE: What philosophical evidence is there against believing in non-physical entities?
August 31, 2016 at 9:14 am
(This post was last modified: August 31, 2016 at 9:14 am by Neo-Scholastic.)
(August 29, 2016 at 10:56 pm)LostLocke Wrote: Right. Testimony and "records" are anecdotal.Except when they aren't. Put enough together and you have a case study. It's a common scientific practice to take commonly reported experiences, look for commonalities and wonder if something is behind them. Skeptics tend to misuse the term anecdote. It refers to something totally anomalous. If something happens often enough though, it cannot be dismissed as anomalous. For example, people used to call placebo effects anecdotal because they did not fit the model prior of how healing works. In that model, there had to be an effective ingredient in order to produce healing effects.
Similarly, alien abductions were considered 'anecdotal' because what they described did not fit how we thought the universe worked. But thousands of people claim to have been abducted. Now I am most definitely NOT saying that these should be taken at face value. I doubt very much that aliens are visiting the earth. But there is a widespread phenomena that is in no way anecdotal. It may be a perfectly understandable and interesting explanation. Calling it anecdotal becomes just another way to take it off the study table for no other reason that it doesn't fit the model of how we think the world should work.
