Title: Vaccine Hesitancy and Discursive Spaces

Abstract:

Interactions between scientific experts and lay people do not always go smoothly. Studies report that sometimes lay people report feeling silenced and not being taken seriously by experts, and that this may lead to distrust or lower levels of trust in science and negative reactions to experts’ recommendations. This paper focuses on understanding how to make the interactions between scientific experts and lay people epistemically and ethically sound, e.g., able to improve understanding and promote autonomy and trust. In particular, it focuses on issues raised by communication approaches adopted in the interactions between healthcare providers and vaccine hesitant parents. Research in science communication highlights that the way agents interact in medical encounters, such as those happening in clinics, may play a critical role in shaping people’s attitudes and decisions regarding vaccinations, either contributing to increasing or decreasing levels of trust and to mitigating or fostering vaccine hesitancy, and has focused on understanding which communication approaches should be used in encounters. Although the philosophical literature has paid limited attention to these studies, the communication approaches adopted in medical encounters raise several epistemic and ethical questions that should be carefully analysed. In this paper, I will analyse two main types of communication approaches analysed in those studies, i.e., the presumptive approach and the participatory approach, and develop an analysis of these approaches based on a refined explication of Lorraine Code’s notion of discursive space that investigates the epistemic and social desirability of these approaches. 

 

Full details: https://epistemicinjusticeinhealthcare.org/epic-seminar-series