ABSTRACT
The experiences of the healthcare providers are quite different, however. They see a boy on the decline, working hard to breathe, suffering under the strain of tests and medications and therapy. The situation described is, sadly, not uncommon in children’s hospitals, and such situations pose significant ethical challenges for parents and providers. In 1877 Charles Sanders Peirce wrote his well-known work “The Fixation of Belief.” As Cheryl Misak and Rob Talisse have vehemently and successfully argued, the position that Peirce takes in the paper identifies a particular and important characteristic of belief itself, and this characteristic has far-reaching epistemological implications. James never practiced as a physician and, unlike John Dewey, almost never used medicine and physicians as examples when elucidating points in his arguments. Edmund Pellegrino (1920–2013) rightly noted over forty years ago that medicine is about making “a decision ‘good’ for this patient”.
