The COVID-19 crisis has transformed the highly specialized issue of what constitutes reliable medical evidence into a topic of public concern and debate. This book interrogates the assumption that evidence means the same thing to different constituencies and in different contexts. Rather than treating various practices of knowledge as rational or irrational in purely scientific terms, it explains the controversies surrounding COVID-19 by drawing on a theoretical framework that recognizes different types of rationality, and hence plural conceptualizations of evidence. Debates within and beyond the medical establishment on the efficacy of measures such as mandatory face masks are examined in detail, as are various degrees of hesitancy towards vaccines. The authors demonstrate that it is ultimately through narratives that knowledge about medical and other phenomena is communicated to others, enters the public space, and provokes discussion and disagreements. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Author(s): Eivind Engebretsen, Mona Baker
Edition: 1
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Tags: pandemic, pandemics, COVID-19, covid, public health, rationality, evidentiary truth
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgements
1 Evidence in Times of Crisis
1.1 The Status of Evidence in Evidence-Based Medicine
1.2 Organization of Chapters
2 Narrative Rationality and the Logic of Good Reasons
2.1 The Narrative Paradigm: Basic Tenets
2.2 Narrative Paradigm vs Rational World Paradigm
2.3 Narrative Probability, Narrative Fidelity and the Logic of Good Reasons
2.3.1 Narrative Probability (Coherence)
2.3.2 Narrative Fidelity
3 Whose Evidence? What Rationality? The Face Mask Controversy
3.1 Structural and Material (In)coherence in Expert Narratives
3.2 Transcendental Values, Narrative Accrual and Narrative Identification
3.2.1 The Logic of Good Reasons, Narrative Accrual and Identification: Public Safety and Structural Racism
3.2.2 Good Reasons, Precarious Manhood and Homophobia
3.3 Beyond Precariousness: Personal Freedom vs Social Responsibility
4 Whose Lives? What Values? Herd Immunity, Lockdowns and Social/Physical Distancing
4.1 Structural/Material (In)coherence or Science vs Values in the Great Barrington and John Snow Declarations
4.2 Health, the Economy and the State: Resonance and Lived Experience
4.3 Transcendental Values and Conceptions of Freedom
4.4 Public Health Recommendations and the Values and Principles of Evidence-based Policy Making
5 The Rational World Paradigm, the Narrative Paradigm and the Politics of Pharmaceutical Interventions
5.1 Structural and Material (In)coherence: Science and Public Policy under Pressure
5.2 Characterological Coherence and Public Confidence in Vaccines
5.3 Transcendental Values and Conceptions of Freedom
5.4 Pure Bodies, Microchips and Genetically Modified Organisms
5.5 Resonance, Lived Experience and Trust
6 Objectivist vs Praxial Knowledge: Towards a Model of Situated Epistemologies and Narrative Identification
6.1 Limitations of Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm
6.2 Revisiting and Extending the Narrative Paradigm
6.3 Narrative Identification in the Age of Fragmented Narratives
6.4 A Final Note on Critical Appraisal in the EBM Model
References
Index
