The Challenge for Public Health

Abstract

This chapter argues that public health can only effectively manage the health of populations if it engages with the cognitive strategies that lay people use to judge public health problems. These strategies have always been a part of human rational competence. Yet, the application of this important rational resource to issues in public health has been neglected by theorists to date. The chapter examines three disciplines which converge on the study of reasoning in health contexts: critical thinking; health psychology; and the public understanding of science. Although each of these disciplines has a different set of explanatory concerns, it is argued that none of them succeed in addressing the cognitive strategies that people use to make judgements about public health issues. It is contended that the hitherto neglected discipline of informal logic provides a valuable starting point for the development of a theory of public health reasoning.