Doctor Distrust: Pragmatism, Intersectionality, and the Confluence of Expertise and Interests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The idea that only experts can be privy to knowledge about the world has been strongly contested throughout recent history. Using interviews with 39 British seniors tasked to discuss the role of doctors in matters of life and death, I argue that distrust for expert knowledge stems largely from the belief that knowledge is deeply shaped by personal experience. However, such distrust is not absolute as respondents still hold some faith in medical expertise due to their own perceived lack of medical knowledge and experiences with the medical field. As such, I assert that respondents demonstrate ambivalence towards medical expertise due to the confluence of expertise and interests that they find in the role that doctors play in assisting individuals with their health. I connect my findings to the theoretical traditions of American pragmatism and intersectionality to demonstrate how the ambivalence demonstrated by respondents signals their tacit use of a combination of these theories or what I term pragmatic intersectionality.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".