• DOI:10.1007/978-94-009-6254-5_8
• Corpus ID: 140974610

Explication and Implications of the Placebo Concept

@inproceedings{Grnbaum1984ExplicationAI,
  title={Explication and Implications of the Placebo Concept},
  author={Adolf Gr{\"u}nbaum},
  year={1984}
}

• A. Grünbaum
• Published 1984
• Psychology

Just what is the problem of identifying an intervention or treatment t of one sort or another as a placebo for a target disorder D? One set of circumstances, among others, in which the need for such an identification may arise is the following: After the administration of t to some victims of D, some of them recover from their affliction to a significant extent. Now suppose that there is cogent evidence that this improvement can indeed be causally attributed at all to some factors or other among the spectrum of constituents comprising the dispensation of Mo a patient. Then it can become important to know whether the therapeutic gain that ensued from t in the alleviation of D was due to those particular factors in its dispensation that the advocates of t have theoretically designated as deserving the credit for the positive treatment-outcome. And one aim of this paper is to articulate in detail the bearing of the answer to this question on whether t qualifies generically as a placebo or not. For, as will emerge, the medical and psychiatric literature on placebos and their effects is conceptually bewildering to the point of being a veritable Tower of Bable.