This is a special topics Honors seminar that investigates the roles communication plays in analytical thought, scientific investigation, and the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental and physical illnesses. The study of artful communication, the course argues, gives us the tools needed to investigate the mystic power of scientific discourse, the objectivity of scientific investigation, and the deep impact of medical discourse on the individual body and the body polis. Thus, students in this course will discover the tools that scientists and doctors, politicians and experts, have available to them when they desire to influence our common world by shaping knowledge, its products and uses, and the publics who consume and participate in their goods—knowledge, technology, medicine, and health. We are all scientists, as A. F. Huxley argues, but more specifically, those who are considering a career in science or medicine will learn in this course how to think critically about the internal and external communicative processes unique to their field and how those practices shape the knowledge, practice, and moral responsibility of their professional enterprise. We are all humans, but more specifically, students in the humanities will explore how to apply their knowledge of language, philosophy, and history to improve their relationships with caregivers enrich their knowledge of the natural world. Most importantly, we are all citizens. This is what unites us and this is why tax dollars are used to fund our enterprise in this very classroom. Being present, here, means a commitment to trying to build a better common world than the one we inherited. Thus, all students will learn how to critically analyze the public arguments of science and medicine and to be mindful of how scientific and medical discourses have been used, historically, to harm, disenfranchise, and kill others.

Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio, 2018

Argumentation theory, or "new rhetoric", focuses on our uses of language when a decision with an action in sight is at stake. In recent years, argumentation theory has proven particularly pertinent to the analysis of the role that language plays in clinical practice and more generally in biomedicine -areas that increasingly involve individual choices regarding health and the body. The combination of rhetoric and medicine, however, is not a new one. The methodological affinities of the two disciplines constituted, in fact, a topos of ancient Greek thought, especially with regards to (1) the ability of the rhetor and the physician to take good decisions, (2) the inherent possibility of deviating from pre-established and fixed paths by elaborating new hypotheses (3) as well as the importance of the individual case in both practices. The idea behind this special issue on "Argumentation and Medicine" arose from the work I have been carrying out over last years in the context of the research group of the Institute of Biomedical Technologies, National Research Council, in Rome. This research in progress is based on the belief that a rhetorical and argumentative perspective -integrated with an ethical stance -can productively retrace and question the reasons why citizens lost interest and confidence in science. Furthermore, this rhetorical perspective may allow us to analyse the debate about fake news, post-truth, and science dissemination. Moreover, this approach can contribute to the contemporary need for what is called "high-quality communication" in the healthcare domain with positive consequences for doctor-patient relationships. In this sense, the main aim of this special issue is to explore the link between argumentation/rhetoric and medicine by putting ancient tradition and contemporary debates into dialogue as well as by gathering contributions from a variety of disciplines which can shed light on the pivotal elements of this relationship. The interconnections between argumentation and medicine need, indeed, to be investigated by different disciplines, methodological approaches and theoretical standpoints (evidence is given by some very interesting and varied examples collected in this issue).

The American Journal of Bioethics, 2010

Office: 3G20 Office Hours: By Appointment COURSE DESCRIPTION Medicine is one of the oldest and most respected professions. It plays an integral part in one form or another in virtually every society on the planet today. Given its centrality in our lives and given the enormous expenditures that go to support it, it is only fitting that medicine should be taken seriously by the humanities. What, then, does a discipline like rhetoric have to say about medicine? How can we use rhetoric to investigate the history, practice, and culture of the medical profession? What insights can rhetoric offer when combined with other fields, such as philosophy, sociology, and anthropology about discourses of health? In this course, we will explore the rhetoric of medicine, examining the role of language, performance, ethics, and power. The aim is to cultivate a critical humanistic perspective on a profession that exercises so much power and authority over our daily lives, and to understand the place of medicine in the modern social imaginary. 3. Sontag, Susan. Illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors. Macmillan, 2001. 4. Selected articles available through UW library databases and online.

Journal of Medical Humanities, 2001

Reasonable persons, it is said, may disagree. In matters of biomedical controversy, one finds logic and evidence and good will on both sides of any given case. What must also be factored in is the art of persuasively construing these elementsof making one's view of things compelling. As human judgment cannot be forced but only elicited, we are ushered to conclusions by the gentle power of persuasion (Billig, 1996). The "rhetoric of reason" appropriate to the study and management of disagreement can be understood only in the context of a complex set of social agreements (Crosswhite, 1996).Yet tensions necessarily arise between a world of rational reflection and one in which choices must be made within contingent circumstance (Nussbaum, 1986). Debates over death and dying, genetic engineering, and fetal research, to name a few, in that sense recapitulate the historical interplay of philosophy and rhetoric as traditions. The concern with getting things right in matters of human care, of meeting the highest ethical and scientific requirements, is put under pressure by time constraints, competing values, compromise, and human limitations. We concoct and wrestle with strategies of language and argument that make this pressure manageable. An account of human judgment would be incomplete without taking under consideration the linguistic inducements to belief. Aristotle's architectonic philosophy assigned to rhetoric the role of bringing the resources of language and opinion to bear on persuasion-his study of rhetoric was a worthy companion to his work on politics and ethics. As an art, rhetoric would concern itself with how the available means of persuasion could be assessed and deployed in situations that might be definitionally and practically up for grabs. There are other robust strains in the classical rhetorical tradition besides the Aristotelian, of course, just as there are multiple threads in the philosophical tradition. Dropping the name of the estimable Greek, at this early juncture, serves as a reminder that rhetoric has at times been the subject of deep philosophical reflection.

The evidence-based medicine (EBM) paradigm has been associated with many benefits, but there have also been 'some negative consequences'. In part, the consequences may be attributable to: (1) limitations in some of the tenets of EBM, and (2) flawed or unethical decisions in healthcare related organisations. We hypothe-sise that at the core of both is a cascade of predominantly unconscious cognitive processes we have syndromically termed 'cognitive biases plus', with conflicts of interest (CoIs) as crucial elements. CoIs (financial, and non-financial including intellectual) catalyse self-serving bias and a cascade of other 'cog-nitive biases plus' with several reinforcing loops. Authority bias, herd effect, scientific inbreeding, repli-cation publication biases, and ethical violations (especially subtle statistical), are key contributors to the cascade; automation biases through uncritical use of statistical software and applications (apps) of preap-praised sources of evidence at point of care, may be other increasingly important factors. The 'cognitive biases plus' cascade which involves several intricately connected healthcare-related organisations has the potential to facilitate, compound and entrench flaws in the paradigm, evidence and decisions that converge to inform person-centered healthcare. Our reasoning is based on observational data and opinion. However, the susceptibility of all humans to 'cognitive biases plus' makes our hypothesis plausible. Individual and collective fallibility may be minimised and the quality of healthcare decisions (including those related to improving EBM) enhanced by being conscious of our vulnerability and open-minded to the 'outside view'. Sir Francis Bacon (1620): " The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it… " (Novum Organum: XLVI)

Poroi, 2013

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 2004

Dissecting Bioethics "Dissecting Bioethics," edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics. The section is dedicated to the idea that words defined by bioethicists and others should not be allowed to imprison people's actual concerns, emotions, and thoughts. Papers that expose the many meanings of a concept, describe the different readings of a moral doctrine, or provide an alternative angle to seemingly selfevident issues are therefore particularly appreciated. The themes covered in the section so far include dignity, naturalness, public interest, community, disability, autonomy, parity of reasoning, symbolic appeals, and toleration.

Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, 2006

Biomedicine examined, 1988