Your questions used the term should. I didn't want to simply answer 'yes' (my first inclination) because I don't consider those criteria to be neccessary, only sufficient. Does that clarify it for you?
Not really, sorry. Do you mean that it is reasonable to believe a claim
if the claim has evidence in support of it
or the claim is believed by many people? Or do you mean that there are other criteria that you haven't disclosed to us yet?
That's why I didn't use the term 'rational' but 'reasonable'. I think they are roughly the same, but not all irrational beliefs are unreasonable.
I will make a concession here - if a belief is widely held
and there is no evidence supporting an alternate theory, then it is reasonable for a person to believe the widely held belief (even if it is outed as incorrect in the future).
Before Charles Darwin came along, the prevailing view was that we were all created by god - there was very little evidence for anything else. Before we discoved the effect that the sun and moon have on the oceans, they were controlled by a god of the tides.
However, that does not apply to the god hypothesis - no alternative explanation is required, because the god hypothesis explains nothing.
Most of us humans are aware that we can make mistakes in judgement and perception. We tend to compare our experiences with others to verify the accuracy of them and decide how to interpret them. It's one reason forums such as this one are so popular. Many people are here seeking confirmation and validation of the way the way they interpret their experiences.
Yes, but I don't see how that has anything to do with the validity or reasonability of conclusions drawn from anecdotal evidence. Or the price of fish.
If most members of someone's social group interpret a particular experience in the same way, we are likely to interpret similar experiences of our own to match their interpretation. Thus, even irrational beleifs can be reasonable. My own favorite irrational belief is "All men are created equal". Clearly false. But I think it's better to build a society on such a belief than it's opposite, which is rational and true.
I don't think it is a good idea to found any society on an irrational belief, thankyou!
Certainly if you use a literal interpretation that statement is irrational. However, I always thought it was mean to be read as, "All people are afforded equal rights."
Personally, I think that founding a society based on your interpretation would be a horrible idea, whereas using my interpretation we have a good basis for society (and one that far better matches American society than your interpretation).
Sure anecdotal evidence is useful in many different situations. Anecdotal evidence is useful in a court of law to establish what may have happened at the scene of a crime; that's why witnesses and experts are brought in and questioned.
Witnesses are, however, notably falliable, and when what a witness claims contradicts the physical evidence, it is not the physical evidence that is discarded. Getting a conviction based solely on eyewitness testimony would be relatively rare (and would have a high likelihood of being incorrect).
Anecdotal evidence is useful in a business situation for everything from exploring what went wrong to figuring out what customers are going to want next.
I don't know how your company figures out what went wrong, but in all the companies I've known, it sure wasn't anecdotal evidence. Someone may have complained and provided anecdotal evidence that there is a some sort of problem, but from there the issue is generally investigated by someone with the relevant expertise.
As for figuring out what customers are going to want next - since when is anecdotal evidence used for that? Last time I checked, that's what market
research was for.
Anecdotal evidence is useful to doctors who must decide what tests, if any, should be run when a patients provides them with testimony regarding their health.
By anecdotal evidence in this situation I'm going to assume you mean subjective symptoms - symptoms that the doctor can't accurately test for (such as 'pain', 'recurring headaches'). I can tell you that such evidence is pretty useless to a doctor - if someone comes in with purely subjective symptoms, the doctor will usually have very little idea of what could specifically be causing the symptoms.
When presented with some kind of overt symptom however, a rash or a fever for example, the doctor can then start to actually narrow things down. And the doctor doesn't do so on the basis of anecdotal evidence, he does so with a background in medical science allowing him to make an informed opinion.
The type of reasoning employed by doctors is called abductive reasoning, by the way, and is very similar to the kind of reasoning a detective would use - coming to a conclusion based upon which hypothesis best fits the evidence (or least conflicts with the evidence).
Anecdotal evidence is useful when deciding what new movie to attend or new restaurant to try. We use anecdotal evidence extensively throughout our everyday lives because objective scientific-caliber is simply not available most of the time when we are making choices.
Yes, we would use it in that situation, but then in that situation we aren't discussing the existence of an object or the objective properties of an object. We are discussing a purely subjective experience (what movie/food does someone like). It is useful in that situation simply because
the answer doesn't actually have any bearing on reality. Whether or not you
like the movie will not have any bearing on whether it exists (existence), or on whether Tom Cruise starred in it (property).
In fact, at the bottom of your post, you give another use for it.
Yes, but this is entirely my point - it is completely incorrect to draw a conclusion from anecdotal evidence, which is what you are suggesting is a valid thing to do!
All that anecdotal evidence tells us is that someone experienced
something - unless they're lying. Without any sort of investigation, we have no way of telling what that 'something' actually is - to blindly accept the word of the person who claimed to have experienced it is to completely skip the investigation phase, and will likely lead you to an incorrect conclusion.
or some other explanation. I think that my brother's wife should know better, and at least consider that there could be other explanations to her sightings. That would be more reasonable. For example, in one of her sightings Tomten ran across the road when she was driving home late at night from work. I asked her to consider that she was tired, that she has these legends in her head, that it was a winter night (dark roads) that it is very common in Sweden that wildlife crosses the roads... There are so many explanations, but hers was right away "Tomten" and I could not get her to consider anything else. 
