Theodore Schick, Jr. and Lewis Vaughn cover truth, mysticism, medicine, the paranormal, UFOs and other fascinating and not so fascinating subjects. Debunking the X-files mindset may be entertaining for some folks, but the best part of this work is an excellent section on what constitutes well-reasoned medicine. They explain how clinical trials should be thought about. Clinical trials that are repeated many times on human beings, having representative, large enough control groups and that account for all relevant causal factors offer the best medical evidence. Individual medical anecdotes should almost always be ignored, even when doctors are delivering the anecdotes.
The authors discuss why solipsism and relativism are bogus. They argue that specific claims are not "true for me and not true for you." They are true or false, period. If you like aardvarks and your neighbor dislikes aardvarks, the claim "You like aardvarks," is true and the claim "Your neighbor likes aardvarks," is false. They are two separate claims, not one claim that is true for you and false for someone else.
However, the categorization and explanation of logical fallacies by the authors is mediocre at best. Much of Weird Things is unclear and mistaken. For example, the following is not a good principle of reasoning: "Premises are unacceptable if they are at least as dubious as the claim they are supposed to support." Does that mean if a conclusion has a five percent probability of being false, a premise with a six percent probability of being false is unacceptable? I think not. If premises are relevant, valuable and have a non-trivial probability of being true, they are acceptable, though they may sometimes deserve only a small weight. The author's emphasis debunking of fringe beliefs gets tiresome after a while. There are more important matters. But much of this work is worth it. Recommended.
249pp. (H) 1995
[Note: This is a quick review I wrote because the original review I wrote is "lost" on a disk that gives me the message "This volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and the volume is not corrupt." If you know a way I can recover the review, I would be grateful.]
—Book review article by J.T.
Fournier
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