Colleagues and students are kindly invited to the second scientific webinar for the Academic Year 2023/24 which be held on Teams on 29th February at 4:00 pm (Italian hour) by Valentina Cuccio (University of Messina). Here the link: http://tinyurl.com/3bnehs7x . The webinar is entitled: "A multilayered embodied account of metaphor in epistemic injustice in mental illness". I remind that the attendance of the webinar is mandatory in order for the students enrolled in the MD in Cognitive science and Theory of communication to get one credit (CFU/ECTS). The attending students have also to write a 10.000 letter report plus bibliography. Here attached you find the flyer of the event.
Abstract: The paper examines epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) in the context of metaphorical communication regarding mental illness, specifically focusing on schizophrenia. It considers the mechanisms that contribute to the failure to attribute credibility and interpretive capabilities to individuals with mental illness (Crichton, Carel, Kidd 2017), when they communicate their illness through metaphors compared to literal language. We hypothesized that the difficulties patients experience in embodying metaphors when communicating their mental illness, coupled with negative social and moral stereotypes held by interpreters, create conditions for epistemic injustice in the form of both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice.
Kidd and Carel (2017) suggested that individuals experiencing illness may encounter a “double injury” in communicating their illness, which is caused by 1) difficulties in expressing their illness experience verbally (inarticulacy) and 2) others’ lack of second-person perspective required to fully comprehend not only the mental illness but also the bodily self in relation to illness (ineffability). The second-person epistemic perspective has to be understood as a relation between an epistemic subject and another self that involves the re-enactment of the epistemic subject’s own bodily experiences and mental states to replicate, and thus understand, the bodily experiences and mental states of the other.
First, the paper presents the merits of metaphor (Lakoff, Johnson 1980), alias its being a powerful communicative tool that provides a name to unnameable experiences (i.e., metaphor’s naming function, Ortony 1975), such as those that people with mental illness might want to express. Metaphors can thus be used as a “starting point” for developing self-illness narratives (Clark 2008), which can overcome both the inarticulacy and ineffability of illness. Metaphors are useful in expressing the “internal life” of individuals with mental illness, which is difficult to express in literal language (Mould et al. 2010).
Second, the paper shows that, although individuals with different mental disorders show impaired abilities in metaphor comprehension (Iakimova et al. 2006, Rossetti et al. 2018), the use of metaphors is associated with a higher quality of life (Adamczyk et al. 2016, Bambini et al. 2016).
While describing the embodied nature of metaphor, some scholars (Lakoff, Johnson 1980, Gibbs 2008) presented it as a cognitive process that helps us understand an abstract target domain such as illness in terms of a concrete source domain. Other authors (Bowes, Katz 2015, Ervas 2022) argued that metaphors can also help achieve communicative intimacy between the speaker and the listener, bringing them closer to each other.
Thus, even when metaphorical understanding is difficult, the ability to produce metaphors can be a valuable communicative resource for people with mental illness. The case of schizophrenia is interesting for understanding the limits and benefits of metaphors in overcoming communicative-pragmatic deficits. Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder characterized by a wide range of clinical manifestations, ranging from positive symptoms, such as delusions, and disorganized speech to negative symptoms, such as reduced emotional expression or avolition (Tandon et al. 2013). Although its definition and etiology are still debated, it is widely accepted that one of its core aspects is a deficit in communicative-pragmatic abilities (Parola et al. 2021): schizophrenic patients have difficulties understanding non-literal language such as irony (Gavilán, García-Albea, 2011), indirect speech-acts (Corcoran, 2003), idioms (Pesciarelli et al. 2014), and metaphors (Bambini et al. 2020). While they produce a similar amount of figurative language as non-schizophrenic individuals, they tend to use metaphors literally (Elvevag et al. 2011; Littlemore 2019). Additionally, schizophrenic patients have a broader deficit in social cognition, which contributes to difficulties in building social interactions (Garcia et al. 2017). Alterations in bodily mechanisms, particularly disturbances in the bodily self-experience, can lead to a disruption of the minimal self and social dysfunctions in schizophrenic patients (Gallese, Ferri 2013, 2014).
The paper argues that these bodily disturbances contribute to epistemic injustice as the body plays a foundational role in building social understanding and relationships. The loss of an integrated minimal bodily self, due to a dysfunction of the bodily self-experience, makes it not possible, for people who have schizophrenia, the automatic attunement with the other which enables the establishment of both a second-person epistemic perspective and the self-other relationship. We argue that both the automatic bodily attunement with the other and the establishment of a self-other relationship are pre-requisites for recognizing the speaker as a trustable epistemic subject because prior to any recognition of the other as a trustable epistemic subject there is the recognition of the other as a self.
In this embodied account of epistemic injustice, the body is considered as the matrix that makes possible our social understanding. The body has a foundational role in building an “embodied” epistemic relation, which Marleau-Ponty (1960/1964) defined as “intercorporeality”.
A multilayered and interactive model of epistemic injustice in mental illness is thus proposed starting from the case of schizophrenia, where a basic, non-conceptual and implicit level of (possibly disrupted) bodily mechanisms (Cuccio 2018) interact with an upper, conceptual and implicit (possibly made explicit) level of conceptual metaphors, stereotyped and frozen in a linguistic community (Ervas 2017).
Despite the challenges posed by metaphors in mental illness communication, the paper will anyway show that metaphors can still serve as a valuable tool for facilitating better communication between individuals with schizophrenia and interpreters. Metaphors are indeed crucial for individuals with schizophrenia to express their experiences related to their illness and for their family, friends, healthcare providers, and other members of their social circle to gain a better understanding of their experiences.