Language in Bioethics: Beyond the Representational View

Abstract

Though assumptions about language underlie all bioethical work, the field has rarely partaken of theories of language. This article encourages a more linguistically engaged bioethics. We describe the tacit conception of language that is frequently upheld in bioethics—what we call the representational view, which sees language essentially as a means of description. We examine how this view has routed the field’s theories and interventions down certain paths. We present an alternative model of language—the pragmatic view—and explore how it expands and clarifies traditional bioethical concerns. To lend concreteness, we apply the pragmatic view to a pervasive concept in bioethics and adjacent fields: decision making. We suggest that problems of the decision-making approach to bioethical issues are grounded in adherence to the representational view. Drawing on empirical work in surgery and critical care, we show how the pragmatic view productively reframes bioethical questions about how medical treatments are pursued.

Keywords:

• anthropology
• decision making
• health services research
• informed consent professional-patient relationship
• sociology

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Pragmatics’ is used to label diverse scholarship on the relationship of language and context. We present one particular view of this relationship here.

2 The capacity of language to represent actually relies in several ways on indexicality, but for simplicity’s sake we keep the functions distinct in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.