Constructing contentious and noncontentious facts: How gynecology textbooks create certainty around pharma-contraceptive safety
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using critical discourse analysis, we examine how seven popular gynecology textbooks use sociolinguistic devices to describe the health effects of pharma-contraception (intrauterine and hormonal methods). Though previous studies have noted that textbooks generally use neutral language, we find that gynecology textbooks differentially deployed linguistic devices, framing pharma-contraceptive benefits as certain and risks as doubtful. These discursive strategies transform pharma-contraceptive safety into fact. We expand on Latour and Woolgar's concept of noncontentious facts by showing how some facts that are taken for granted by the medical community still require discursive fortification to counter potential negative accusations from outside the profession. We call these contentious facts. Our findings suggest that a pro-pharma orientation exists in gynecology textbooks, which may influence physicians' understanding of pharmaceutical safety. As such, these texts may affect medical practice by normalizing pharma-contraceptives without full considerations of their risks.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it