ABSTRACT
Building on the ideas of the previous Chapter 6, we bring poetry into a discussion of ontological understanding from the fields of Externalism and Enactivism, eventually settling on Object-Oriented Ontology as a good system to understand medical encounters. Charles Peirce’s method of abductive reasoning is explored as a “situated” or worldly way in which clinical decisions may be reached where a range of contextual factors are synthetically organised in what is commonly known as “clinical gestalt” or pattern recognition. We note that poets place words in “fields” in similar patterning of language, where metaphors are embodied; while, linking to this, embodiment for the new “extended” cognitive psychology embraces qualities of objects, one in relation to another. Thus, a network of understanding, transactions and implications between persons, objects, and ideas (signs and symbols) is set up that characterises both a poetic imagination (the world is seen again and in wonder) and a medical imagination (the patient is re-viewed with concern and deep attention). Such a network approach is captured in the new philosophical movement of “Object-Oriented Ontology” where a clinical judgement is distributed across persons and artefacts in space, transcending “story”. We use Sylvia Plath’s poetry in particular to demonstrate this model, where for both clinical and poetic reasoning “things fall into place”.
