Towards a feminist pragmatic turn in the philosophy of medicine

Ana Maria Popescu

Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna

This presentation examines the claim of epistemic neutrality in contemporary evidence-based medicine and argues that such neutrality is a constructed ideal rather than an actual feature of scientific practice. Medicine presents itself as value-free, yet this appearance is achieved through value-laden assumptions about both disease classification and evidence production. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of data, the presentation argues that part of the problem is rooted in a flawed conception of evidence: data are not neutral givens but constructed and evaluated in relation to specific purposes.
Within the philosophy of medicine, this insight is reflected in the so-called pragmatic turn, which rejects monistic definitions of health and disease in favour of plural and context-sensitive concepts. Rather than asking what they are in an abstract sense, pragmatic approaches emphasise how the concepts function in practice and what epistemic and practical consequences follow from their use. However, this framework remains incomplete: while recognising the context-dependence of the concepts of health and disease, it does not provide a normative framework for evaluating whether, and for whom, the concepts employed in a given context are epistemically adequate and just, thereby risking the treatment of all purposes as equally legitimate.
The presentation therefore develops a feminist pragmatic framework to address this limitation. It argues that making values explicit does not undermine objectivity but strengthens it, and that only a feminist normative framework provides the resources needed to produce more reliable and just medical knowledge.

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