Social-Epistemic Rhetoric of (Un)certainty in Biomedical and Psychiatric Scientific Academic Writing: a Diatextual Analy
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Social-Epistemic Rhetoric of (Un)certainty in Biomedical and Psychiatric Scientific Academic Writing: a Diatextual Analysis Amelia Manuti 1
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& Giuseppe Mininni & Rosa Scardigno & Ignazio Grattagliano
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Received: 10 March 2020 / Revised: 28 July 2020 / Accepted: 8 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
In line with the general aims of scientific textuality, research papers in the biomedical and psychiatric academic domains mostly attempt to demonstrate the validity of their assumptions and to contrast with the sense of uncertainty that sometimes frames their conclusions. Moving from this premise, the present paper aimed to focus on these features and to investigate if and the extent to which biomedical and psychiatric texts convey different social-epistemic rhetoric of uncertainty. In view of this, a qualitative study was conducted adopting diatextual analysis to investigate a corpus of 298 scientific articles taken from the British Medical Journal and from the British Journal of Psychiatry published in 2013. Our analytical approach led to identifying two different types of social-epistemic rhetoric. The first one was mostly oriented to “describing” the world, accounting for the body-mind nexus as conceptualized within the “medical” point of view. On the other hand, the second one was oriented to “interpreting” the world, debating the problematic and critical features of the body-mind relationship as developed within the psychiatry discursive realm. Keywords Scientific academic writing . Uncertainty . Discourse analysis . Mitigation . Socialepistemic rhetoric
* Amelia Manuti [email protected] Giuseppe Mininni [email protected] Rosa Scardigno [email protected] Ignazio Grattagliano [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Manuti et al.
Introduction Since ancient times, medical practice has been considered a science guided by a system of beliefs constantly in balance between the need for certainty and the experience of doubt. Across the last decades, the promotion of evidence-based medicine (EBM) has improved the need for judiciously using the best evidences to take decisions about patients in the clinical domain (Sackett et al. 1996). Being proposed as a reassuring and encouraging paradigm, EBM is an important cultural frame in post-modern times, “when doctors are no longer infallible heroes” (Maier 2006: 325). The available evidences represent the core of a methodological path that, offering empirical support for effectiveness and safety, can legitimate medical practices in the more general context of law and society. Even if psychiatrists tried to seriously be considered in the medical disciplines, some features of this scientific domain can limit the applicability of EBM (Gray and Pinson 2003), especially referring to the validity of a diagnosis as well as to issues of complexity and non-linear dynamics (cf. Maier 2006). This complexity has been fully confirmed enlarging the Cartesian “body/mind” dichotomy to a wider effo
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