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Healthcare Practice, Epistemic Injustice, and Naturalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2018

Ian James Kidd  and
Havi Carel
Ian James Kidd*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
Havi Carel*
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
*
ian.kidd@nottingham.ac.uk
havi.carel@bristol.ac.uk
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Abstract

Ill persons suffer from a variety of epistemically-inflected harms and wrongs. Many of these are interpretable as specific forms of what we dub pathocentric epistemic injustices, these being ones that target and track ill persons. We sketch the general forms of pathocentric testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, each of which are pervasive within the experiences of ill persons during their encounters in healthcare contexts and the social world. What's epistemically unjust might not be only agents, communities and institutions, but the theoretical conceptions of health that structure our responses to illness. Thus, we suggest that although such pathocentric epistemic injustices have a variety of interpersonal and structural causes, they are also sustained by a deeper naturalistic conception of the nature of illness.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 84: Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice , November 2018 , pp. 211 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2018 

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References

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47 We are grateful to the audience at the Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice conference for helpful discussion and to the editors of this volume and an anonymous referee for generous comments. Havi Carel gratefully acknowledges the support of the Wellcome Trust provided through the grant ‘Life of Breath: breathing in cultural, clinical and lived experience’ (grant ref. number 103340); for more information, visit <www.lifeofbreath.org>.