Attitudinalism in Medicine

[Mark Graber]

I confess to be getting a little lost here.  It seems we can have
several debates. The first is over foundationalism in law, medicine, and
anything else, whether legal, medical, and other questions have
objectively right answers.  Another debate is, even if there are
objectively right answers to legal, medical, and other questions,
whether people may have good-faith disputes over what those answers are,
and whether those disputes may be patterned.  My comments are limited to
this second debate.  I think that, for example, even if there is a cure
for cancer, doctors in the present solely interested in curing their
patients may have good faith disputes over what that cure is and that we
are likely to see the same pattern of difference across disputes over
the treatment of particular cancers.

MAG

Sean Wilson writes

.. I have always been amazed that claims of bias come most loudly from
those who do not even recognize foundation to begin with. That such a
blatant contradiction ever formed itself into a generational hegemony in
academia is something that always troubled me. As Wittgenstein showed,
there are conditions of assertability in all of our utterances. Before
one can claim "bias," one must silently have said something about the
criteria for foundation (the enthymematic part of the utterance). How an
academic could become so overcome with passion as to deconstruct the
path to knowledge --  only to then (a) offer his or her own
prescriptions; and (b) cry foul when counter prescriptions emerge -- is
beyond me.    
  
 (I think this post is now of topic. Eugene, please accept my
apologies).

Scott Gerber <s-gerber at onu.edu> wrote:
 Mark:

We are engaged in a disagreement that has occupied law, politics, and 
society since at least the rise of post-modernism (witness, for 
example, Pope Benedict's recent speeches criticizing moral relativism 
[a lifelong concern of his, it seems]). I reject post-modernism, 
although I concede, as I state in my prior post, that most of the 
academy (and society also, according to the Pope), has embraced it.

I hope your summer is going well.
Scott