Carl Mitcham

THE EXPERIENCE OF AGONIZING PAIN AND SIGNALS OF DISEMBODIMENT

Philosophical literature discussing embodiment has yet to address the many and multiple modes of disembodiment. The analysis of interviews with burn patients who had experienced agonizing injuries reveals reference to their own body parts using depersonalized language (i.e., it, the, this). The conjectures tested were: disembodiment (1) due to loss of sensation; (2) due to loss of ability to control the affected part; (3) as learned from physicians; (4) as a means to protect the self in an agonizing situation; or (5) as a means of controlling overwhelming pain. These alternative explanations for the use of linguistic signals of disembodiment were assessed by comparing burn patient interviews with interviews of patients who differed by significant characteristics (i.e., patients who had spinal cord injuries, transplants, or myocardial infarction). Thus, alternative conjectures for the use of disembodying language were excluded, and the interpretation is advanced that the use of disembodying language by burn patients points toward a special human capacity to maintain the integrity of the self during prolonged agonizing experiences. The present study thus attempts a phenomenological interpretation of the body and its experience by drawing on otherwise neglected qualitative research data to broaden and deepen our understanding of the experience of excruciating pain.

Integrating concepts for the development of qualitatively-derived theory.

The development of qualitatively-derived theory (QDT) remains a challenge for researchers wishing to retain the complexity of reality. The techniques of concept integration provide a means to link concepts according to their shared attributes and logically according to their mutual interactions, reactions, and responses. While retaining all of the advantages of qualitative induction, integrating concepts in this manner places QDT theory at the upper end of mid-range theory, or disclosive theory, to produce a theory of higher abstraction and broader scope.

Compathy or Physical Empathy: Implications for the Caregiver Relationship

In this article a case is made for the importance of a previously overlooked phenomenon, physical empathy orcompathy,defined as the physical manifestation of caregiver distress that occurs in the presence of a patient in physical pain or distress. According to the similarity of a caregivers response to the original symptoms, there can be four types of compathetic response: identical, initiated, transferred, and converted. Controlling for the compathetic response may involve narrowing ones focus and/or changing caregiver attitudes. Finally, we argue that while the compathetic response may be beneficial to the caregiving relationship, enabling the provision of appropriate and adequate humane treatment and care, the caregiver must at times shield against the compathetic response in order to provide care.

Justifying public participation in technical decision making

The need for expert knowledge and expert knowledge-based action in an advanced technoscientific society poses a fundamental challenge to any attempt to involve the public in the specialized basis of this society, i.e. in technical decision-making. The concern is not so much with how to meet this challenge at the practical level; it is with how to ground or rationally defend the will to do so-and to provide a brief topology of discussions that are deepening this understanding. So the author sketches out reasons for participation-as prolegomena to undertaking the work of actually creating or institutionalizing such participation. The task is more theoretical than applied, but, like the mathematics and physics that commonly prepare the way for the engineering sciences and the practice of engineering design, the task is not without practical importance.

Why Science, Technology, and Society Studies?

This article presents a brief argument for STS studies as grounded in fundamental historical transformations of the human condition, outlines seven distinct approaches to STS, and concludes with a brief for STS as the new form of a liberal education.

Ethics in bioengineering.

Bioengineering, as the decisive extension of engineering action to human life itself, constitutes a fundamental enlargement of the technical realm, and calls for a commensurate expansion of ethical reflection. In fact, the engineering profession has been actively pursuing the development of new ethical codes, and the promotion of ethics by bioengineers both in the United States and on the international level deserves philosophical recognition and support.

Tools For Conviviality : Argument, Insight, Influence

Ivan Illich is the author of more than ten books during the last twenty years published in over a dozen languages. In their diversity these works can appear to defy thematic unity. Their focus seems variously to be pastoral theology, education, development policy, medicine, economics, urban planning, gender, literacy. What follows is an exercise in taking one of these books, Tools for Conviviality, as central to the Illich corpus as capable of benefiting from a detailed interpretive analysis.1