Epistemic injustice in healthcare: a philosophial analysis
Top Cited Papers
- 17 April 2014
- journal article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy
- Vol. 17 (4), 529-540
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-014-9560-2
Abstract
In this paper we argue that ill persons are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice in the sense articulated by Fricker (Epistemic injustice. Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). Ill persons are vulnerable to testimonial injustice through the presumptive attribution of characteristics like cognitive unreliability and emotional instability that downgrade the credibility of their testimonies. Ill persons are also vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because many aspects of the experience of illness are difficult to understand and communicate and this often owes to gaps in collective hermeneutical resources. We then argue that epistemic injustice arises in part owing to the epistemic privilege enjoyed by the practitioners and institutions of contemporary healthcare services—the former owing to their training, expertise, and third-person psychology, and the latter owing to their implicit privileging of certain styles of articulating and evidencing testimonies in ways that marginalise ill persons. We suggest that a phenomenological toolkit may be part of an effort to ameliorate epistemic injustice.Keywords
This publication has 24 references indexed in Scilit:
- A pluralist challenge to “integrative medicine”: Feyerabend and Popper on the cognitive value of alternative medicineStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2013
- How Much Would You Give to Save a Dying Bird? Patient Advocacy and Biomedical ResearchNew England Journal of Medicine, 2012
- Phenomenology as a Form of EmpathyInquiry, 2012
- Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social InstitutionsSocial Epistemology, 2012
- Culpability for Epistemic Injustice: Deontic or Aretetic?Social Epistemology, 2012
- Phenomenology as a Resource for PatientsJournal of Medicine and Philosophy, 2012
- Some Varieties of Epistemic Injustice: Reflections on FrickerEpisteme, 2010
- Two Concepts of Epistemic InjusticeEpisteme, 2010
- The Meaning of Illness: A Phenomenological Approach to the Patient-Physician RelationshipJournal of Medicine and Philosophy, 1987
- Gaps in Doctor-Patient CommunicationNew England Journal of Medicine, 1969