Normative Triage: On the Dialectics of Philosophical Generality and Medical Ontology"
Lisa Landoe Hedrick, MA, PhD. Candidate in Theology, University of Chicago Divinity School
Normative affairs are ineliminable element of human nature -- they are, in a sense, inescapable. We are ceaselessly concerned with evaluating such guides to thought and action as values, purposes, and ideals. The issue of normative authority has occupied thinkers across the Continental-Analytic philosophical and theological divide. It is common to draw distinctions between normative enterprises and scientific enterprises, but the boundaries are not so clear from a pragmatic point of view. At issue in both philosophy and the sciences is the nature of such concepts integral to both enterprises such as "reality", "the self", and even "disease", "infection", "patient", and "diagnosis". As understandings of such notions shift in the sciences, our philosophical and theological assessments ought to remain adequate; and as our philosophical and theological innovations develop novel coherent systems elucidating experience, our sciences can reimagine the nature of their pursuits. There is no hard-and-fast distinction between these cognitive endeavors insofar as the vocabularies employed by each participate in a shared inferential network forged by encounter with the same world. This is not an indelicate construal of the academic disciplines; it is a candid statement of what is so obvious it is often forgotten. Indeed, the boundary between this discursive domain and that of speculative philosophy and theology is increasingly diminished as we parse the situation beyond relatively unquestioned definitional assumptions. At a certain level, facts and values are not so distinct. We constantly engage in a sort of normative triage in assessing the challenge to a portion of our evaluative structures when phenomena occur that were not plausible or credible (read: inferable) in our working semiotic-lexiconic toolshed -- for instance, when counterintuitive mappings of cognitive function or the constitutive role of a microbiome force questions of the makings of a self, consciousness, or the boundaries and unity of a body. Such questions are at play in larger reconsiderations of the nature of experience -- a volatile and polygonal notion in the history of philosophy and religious studies. In this paper, I will investigate the dialectical interplay between the normative assumptions operative in a society and the consequent renderings of "matters of fact", particularly how this interplay affects medical ontology and practice.
Normative affairs are ineliminable element of human nature -- they are, in a sense, inescapable. We are ceaselessly concerned with evaluating such guides to thought and action as values, purposes, and ideals. The issue of normative authority has occupied thinkers across the Continental-Analytic philosophical and theological divide. It is common to draw distinctions between normative enterprises and scientific enterprises, but the boundaries are not so clear from a pragmatic point of view. At issue in both philosophy and the sciences is the nature of such concepts integral to both enterprises such as "reality", "the self", and even "disease", "infection", "patient", and "diagnosis". As understandings of such notions shift in the sciences, our philosophical and theological assessments ought to remain adequate; and as our philosophical and theological innovations develop novel coherent systems elucidating experience, our sciences can reimagine the nature of their pursuits. There is no hard-and-fast distinction between these cognitive endeavors insofar as the vocabularies employed by each participate in a shared inferential network forged by encounter with the same world. This is not an indelicate construal of the academic disciplines; it is a candid statement of what is so obvious it is often forgotten. Indeed, the boundary between this discursive domain and that of speculative philosophy and theology is increasingly diminished as we parse the situation beyond relatively unquestioned definitional assumptions. At a certain level, facts and values are not so distinct. We constantly engage in a sort of normative triage in assessing the challenge to a portion of our evaluative structures when phenomena occur that were not plausible or credible (read: inferable) in our working semiotic-lexiconic toolshed -- for instance, when counterintuitive mappings of cognitive function or the constitutive role of a microbiome force questions of the makings of a self, consciousness, or the boundaries and unity of a body. Such questions are at play in larger reconsiderations of the nature of experience -- a volatile and polygonal notion in the history of philosophy and religious studies. In this paper, I will investigate the dialectical interplay between the normative assumptions operative in a society and the consequent renderings of "matters of fact", particularly how this interplay affects medical ontology and practice.