Maternal Expertise, Vaccination Recommendations, and the Complexity of Argument Spheres

Abstract

Recent controversies over vaccination highlight the complex relationship between personal, technical, and public spheres of argument as evidentiary criteria used to evaluate claims in one sphere are applied to claims in another sphere. In this essay, I turn to two cases to make apparent the problems that arise when scientific research is conflated with evidence based on intuition. First, I consider the case of the corporate colonization of the personal sphere. In this example, Merck, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures Gardasil, a vaccine to prevent human papillovirus (HPV), persuades its audience of the need for vaccination, not with tested scientific evidence, but through personal sphere appeals. Second, I turn to the MMR-autism controversy to evaluate what happens when standards from the personal sphere are applied to epistemic issues falling into the technical sphere and are then applied to questions of public policy. Together these cases illustrate ways in which the encroachment of one sphere on another affects how people evaluate arguments in order to make decisions regarding public health.