| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation explores some of the ethical and epistemic implications of metaphors, with particular attention to those used in health-related communication. Analogical reasoning, including that brought about through metaphor, is an epistemically valuable tool. By drawing comparisons of structural relations across domains, metaphors suggest different things do, and sometimes should, work in the same way. This helps us reason through new problems, ask new questions, and conceptualize new phenomena by allowing existing knowledge to transfer to new domains. However, the knowledge systems within which metaphors do this epistemic work are inequitable, and metaphors help to perpetuate this inequality by building on the biases within these systems, which has further ethical implications. This dissertation suggests some of the ways this occurs is through shaping the specification of principles used in moral deliberation and justification, embedding new phenomena in, and recreating, oppressing discursive narratives, and facilitating the inequitable distribution of epistemic resources.
The three manuscripts contained within this dissertation each explore one of these facets of the ethical implications of metaphors. First, using the example of war metaphors used during the COVID-19 pandemic, I explore how metaphors may shape the prioritization of ethical principles by suggesting an analogical relationship to a paradigm case. Second, using the example of Canadian news media coverage of the first month of the 2022 monkeypox outbreak, I explore how metaphors embed phenomena in dominant discursive narratives and the ethical implications of reinforcing these narratives. Third, I examine the ethical implications of the epistemic work metaphors do by digging deeper into the cognitive and epistemic facets of metaphors. Finally, I conclude by arguing for being critical of metaphors, intentionally critiquing them for their limitations, prompting for disanalogy, and engaging with non-dominant discourse. I suggest this may assist in supporting metaphors to do ethical epistemic work, build critical interpretive skills for recognizing when metaphors may be unethical, and allow them to be creatively used for their ethical potential. | en_US |
