Health care as participatory sense-making: an enactive perspective on relations between patients and health care providers

Geoffrey Dierckxsens ()
Additional contact information
Geoffrey Dierckxsens: Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Mind & Society: Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences, 2025, vol. 24, issue 1, No 5, 69-89

Abstract: Abstract Participatory sense-making is already an established concept within enactivism. It is used to define the participatory nature of cognitive relations, designating that humans and other organisms make sense of their surrounding environments not just on their own. They build cooperative networks, working together, to create ways of making sense of the world. However, so far little attention has been paid to how enactive concepts, such as participatory sense-making, may apply to the field of bioethics, understood here as health care ethics. In this paper, I examine health care practices cases of participatory sense-making. The paper aims to show that relations between patients and health care providers (HCPs) can be understood as participatory sense-making relations. To make my case, I discuss the so-called phenomenological interview, as proposed technique in health care. I argue that this interview technique has essential features that can be viewed also as features of participatory sense-making. More specifically, the phenomenological interview is an open-minded, a critical, and pro-active dialogue between patient and health care provider that is meant for the patient to raise self-awareness of their body and medical condition, as well as of the social conditions that may affect that experience and condition. I will argue that phenomenological interviews are exemplary cases of patient-health care provider relations in which both parties actively work together to make sense of what the patient is going through and to find adequate medical responses to that experience. I will conclude by proposing normative guidance based on my analysis of health care practice as participatory sense-making. I argue that viewing patient-HCP relations as participatory sense-making may be helpful for both patients and health care providers in that it shows that health care practice is not just a technical exercise or routine task, but essentially relational and patient-oriented.

Keywords: Enactivism; , Bioethics, Participatory sense-making, Health care, Phenomenological interview, Nursing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11299-024-00311-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:minsoc:v:24:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s11299-024-00311-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11299

DOI: 10.1007/s11299-024-00311-y

Access Statistics for this article

Mind & Society: Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences is currently edited by Riccardo Viale

More articles in Mind & Society: Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences from Springer, Fondazione Rosselli Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().