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John said:
what prevents both the dowser and the accidental discoverer of a cure from claiming to use the homoeopathic method is that it is precisely this uniquely obtained knowledge of a medicine's pure effects that distinguishes it from dowsing, from empirical medicine (including herbalism), and in particular from allopathy.
It's the provings themselves that offer the guide that only homoeopaths use, and it's only via the provings that homoeopaths can practise any homoeopathy. Without provings, we're just herbalists and troublemakers.
Ellen repied:
Ok, where possible, we should use terms that homeopaths understand, such as provings. An introductory statement may use "empirical evidence" in place of proving, but we need to be specific in the words we choose for the professional aspect of the defintiion.
Best,
Ellen
When I mentioned the possibility of a technical and a non-technical version of what Hahnemann intended, I wasn't referring to the possibility of using two sentences to define homoeopathy -- or even one sentence.
The delicious aspect of what we're attempting here is that we don't need to describe what it is that we do; we need merely to delineate it so that, as you say, somebody (the person we're talking with) can tell whether something falls within or without it.
Actually, the second delicious aspect of it is that we don't need to -- and in fact can't -- put it into an entire sentence (except one beginning: "Homoeopathy is…"): to define homoeopathy, we need an equivalent part of speech, merely a noun phrase, a phrase that we could use in any sentence in place of the word "homoeopathy".
Let's say, for instance, that we were to end up with a definition of homoeopathy such as: "the medicinal application of the substance whose effects on the healthy most closely resemble the symptoms of the person receiving the medicine".
In that case, in a sentence such as "She practises homoeopathy" or "That isn't homoeopathy" or "Can homoeopathy every include polypharmacy?", we can simple replace the word "homoeopathy" with its definition, and the sentence will continue to mean what it meant. This is part of what makes definitions so nice to work with.
So we're ultimately looking, in restating what Hahnemann meant by homoeopathy, for a phrase whose function in speech is the same as the word "homoeopathy": a thing (an action, a process, a sequence, or some such thing), expressed in a phrase.
Hi John,
Sorry. What you are saying may make sense, but I am going to withdraw from this discussion for a while. I have other pressing issues.
Wishing you and the others the best, I have been enjoying the discussion greatly.
Ellen Madono
