Cummings Louise
a School of Arts and Humanities , Nottingham Trent University.
Health Commun. 2014;29(10):1043-56. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2013.831685. Epub 2014 Jan 21.
The work of public health depends on a relationship of trust between health workers and members of the public. This relationship is one in which the public must trust the advice of health experts, even if that advice is not always readily understood or judged to be agreeable. However, it will be argued in this article that the pact of trust between public health workers and members of the public has been steadily eroded over many years. The reasons for this erosion are examined as are attempts to characterize the concept of trust in empirical studies. The discussion then considers how a so-called informal fallacy, known as the "argument from authority," might contribute to attempts to understand the trust relationship between the public and health experts. Specifically, this argument enables the lay person to bridge gaps in knowledge and arrive at judgements about public health problems by attending to certain logical and epistemic features of expertise. The extent to which lay people are able to discern these features is considered by examining the results of a study of public health reasoning in 879 members of the public.
公共卫生工作依赖于卫生工作者与公众之间的信任关系。在这种关系中，公众必须信任健康专家的建议，即使该建议并非总能被轻易理解或被认为是令人满意的。然而，本文将论证，多年来公共卫生工作者与公众之间的信任契约一直在稳步受到侵蚀。本文将审视这种侵蚀的原因，以及在实证研究中对信任概念进行特征描述的尝试。接着，讨论将考虑一种被称为“诉诸权威论证”的所谓非形式谬误，如何可能有助于理解公众与健康专家之间的信任关系。具体而言，这种论证使外行能够通过关注专业知识的某些逻辑和认知特征来弥合知识差距，并对公共卫生问题做出判断。通过考察对879名公众进行的公共卫生推理研究结果，来探讨外行能够辨别这些特征的程度。
