Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti who reports on a symposium was organised by Mark Flear to explore interdisciplinary perspectives (law, philosophy of psychiatry, bioethics, sociology, and more) on epistemic injustice, hosted by City University on 15th September 2023.  This is a report of some of the talks presented at the symposium. The other talks were given by Anna Drożdżowicz (on epistemic injustice and linguistic exclusion); Miranda Mourby (on reasonable expectations of privacy in healthcare); and Neil Maddox and Mark Flear (on epistemic injustice and separated human biomaterials).  The City Law School, venue of the symposium The first presentation was by David Archard (Queen’s University, Belfast) on lived experience and testimonial injustice. Lived experience is being increasingly used in debates on a number of controversial areas—as a source of special authority on a given subject. The appeal to lived experience often works in resisting claims that contradict live...

On 4th June I attended some talks at the  Valuing Health Conference  at University College London (see picture above), where the themes of Dan Hausman’s book,  Valuing Health  (Oxford University Press, 2015) were discussed. The event was organised by Jo Wolff and James Wilson. The intended audience was philosophers, economists, and also healthcare policy makers. The conference started with a brief overview of the arguments in the book, presented by Dan Hausman (University of Wisconsin) . There are two basic problems the book was meant to address: (1) we need to be able to compare health improvements brought by different policies; (2) we need to know what to do with the information (e.g., maximise health). Thus, the book provides answers to the following questions: How do we assign values to health states? How do we assess policies on the basis of those values? What role should people play in assigning values to policies? The discussion raises further questi...