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Article published In:
Argumentation and Patient Centered Care
Edited by Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, Roosmaryn Pilgram and Nanon Labrie
[Journal of Argumentation in Context 7:2] 2018
► pp. 141–156

The role of argumentative strategies in the construction of emergent common ground in a patient-centered approach to the medical encounter

| Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

In this paper, argumentation practices will be discussed in view of their potential for favoring effective information sharing and the creation of ‘emergent common ground’, i.e. the common ground that is sought, created and co-constructed in the process of communication. Argumentation is usually tightly knit with information sharing: if the parties have not previously shared a sufficient amount of relevant knowledge, it is difficult for them to produce effective argumentation. Based on these premises, in this paper the argumentation stages of medical encounters will be viewed as opportunities to reveal and integrate insufficient common ground between clinicians and patients. By relying on the analysis of a corpus of real life encounters in a chronic care setting, the interaction between information sharing and argumentation will be shown, along with problematic cases of misunderstandings or ineffective argumentation due to lack of common ground. Implications for the clinical practice will be discussed.

Keywords: medical argumentation, emergent common ground, value judgments, activity types, patient-centered care
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Medical interactions as ‘advice seeking’ activity types
    • 2.1The role of common ground in the interaction between doctors and patients
    • 2.2The learning process within medical interactions
      • 2.2.1The formation of assessments
  • 3.Aligning assessments in emergent common ground through argumentation
    • 3.1Discussion
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 October 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jaic.18028.big
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