Keywords
Effectiveness
Bayes' Theorem
Book Review
How to Cite
Abstract
This review critically assesses the main claim and argument of Jacob Stegenga’s book Medical Nihilism, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. It considers some problematic aspects of the application of Bayes’ theorem in support of the author’s thesis, and it discusses a brief selection of unclear consequences.
References
1] Broadbent, A. (2019), Medical Nihilism, in Broadbent, A. in Philosophy of Medicine. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 157-180.
[2] Devanesan, A. (2020), Medical Nihilism: the limits of a decontextualised critique of medicine. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 79: 101189.
[3] Gillies, D. (2018), Should we distrust medical interventions? Metascience, 28: 273-276.
[4] Shan Y. and Williamson J. (2023), Evidential Pluralism in the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge.
[5] Stegenga, J. (2018), Medical Nihilism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2026 Giovanni Sanavio