Physicians in Philosophy of Education: From Cameo Appearance to Leading Role
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I came to this realization during a stint as philosopher in residence at a research center focused on health professions education. In talking with medical education scholars, familiarizing myself with medical education literature, and re- reading philosophy of education literature for what it might say about medical education, it struck me that there were many potential, but few actual, conversations between the fields of medical education and philosophy of education. When philosophers of education have made reference to physicians and surgeons, it has often been by way of comparison with teachers. Many colleagues have found it useful, in order to gain greater clarity about the practice and profession of teaching, to examine its similarities to and differences from medical practices and professions. Few philosophers of education, however, have considered the specificity of medical education as a subset of education. Rather than comparing teachers and doctors, what might philosophers have to say about the teaching of doctors? In this essay I first provide two examples of the ways in which philosophers of education have referred to medical practices and professions. I contrast this with the work of some philosophers of education who have begun to address medical education specifically. I then give some other examples of concepts and practices in medical education that are worth the more sustained attention of philosophers of education, including the idea that physicians should be health advocates, and the conceptual and normative questions this idea raises. The purpose of these examples is to illustrate the argument that medical education and philosophy of education would both benefit from a more sustained engagement with each other.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".