Financializing epistemic norms in contemporary biomedical innovation

The rapid, recent emergence of new medical knowledge models has engendered a dizzying number of new medical initiatives, programs and approaches. Fields such as evidence-based medicine and translational medicine all promise a renewed relationship between knowledge and medicine. The question for phil...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Synthese (Dordrecht) 2019-11, Vol.196 (11), p.4391-4407
Main Author: Robinson, Mark D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biomedical research
Education
Epistemology
Evidence-based medicine
Innovations
Logic
Medicine
Metaphysics
Norms
Philosophy
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Science
S.I.: Medical Knowledge
Social philosophy
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The rapid, recent emergence of new medical knowledge models has engendered a dizzying number of new medical initiatives, programs and approaches. Fields such as evidence-based medicine and translational medicine all promise a renewed relationship between knowledge and medicine. The question for philosophy and other fields has been whether these new models actually achieve their promises to bring about better kinds of medical knowledge—a question that compels scholars to analyze each model's epistemic claims. Yet, these analyses may miss critical components that explain how these models actually work and function. Using the case of translational medicine, this paper suggests that analyses which treat these models as a primarily epistemic interventions miss the way that new approaches are increasingly shaped by specific financial and commercial agendas. Ultimately, social epistemological analyses that are attentive to market forces are required to make sense of emerging bioscientific research models, which are increasingly tethered to or a manifestation of increasingly financialized models of science research and innovation.
ISSN:0039-7857
1573-0964
DOI:10.1007/s11229-018-1704-0