Epistemic Justice and the Medical Expert - Professor Miranda Fricker - Medical Humanities Sheffield

Описание: Medical Humanities Sheffield lecture series at The University of Sheffield by Professor of Philosophy, Miranda Fricker.

Medical professionals have an acutely difficult job in many ways; but I will try to tease out one particular strand of the difficulty. It concerns the ‘epistemic’ or knowledge-related aspect of their role as an expert, particularly regarding how they relate to patients. In epistemology (theory of knowledge) a distinction is often made between two contrasting stances one might take up towards another person from whom one seeks to learn something: an evidential stance, as opposed to a stance of trust. The first tends to press everything into a total set of symptoms to be interpreted by the expert; the second, by contrast, would have the doctor take the patient’s own word at face value without further assessment.

The special difficulty of balancing these two contrasting epistemic stances towards the patient can give rise to dysfunctions in the medic-patient epistemic relation: most obviously the dysfunction that the medic leans too much to the evidential stance, ending up treating the patient more like a thing than a knower in their own right—a dysfunction I will explain as a form of epistemic objectification. And yet an equal and opposite dysfunction would be for the medic to fail to take responsibility as an expert, which very role calls on them to know better than the patient and to be ready, if appropriate, to set aside the patient’s own view in favour of a more informed diagnosis or treatment plan. Such a failure of nerve on the part of the expert would be a kind of epistemic shirking. I will tentatively suggest that one useful way of conceiving what is needed to balance these two stances is a professional virtue of epistemic justice.

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