ABSTRACT
The epistemology of medicine is a young field and few attempts have been made to sketch a complete virtue epistemology of medicine (Marcum 2009; Ahmadi 2015). However, the virtues of the good doctor, both moral and intellectual, have been much studied since antiquity. In this chapter, I consider one particular epistemic virtue that has attracted much attention in the philosophy of medicine: the virtue of ‘clinical judgment’. I hold that clinical judgment is the paradigmatic virtue that doctors need to respond to the epistemic problems with which they are confronted as doctors. These problems include, but are not limited to, the fact that in day-to-day clinical practice the doctor must treat patients who have individual characteristics and peculiar needs and that they must do so under conditions of risk and information scarcity. The particular epistemic problems involved in clinical practice make particular demands on the doctor as thinker, and thinking about ‘clinical judgment’ helps us discover what these are. While clinical judgment may be a virtue that is particularly important in the practice of medicine (or in the broader health professions), thinking about clinical judgment in medicine may also shed light on the nature of professional judgment more generally. It may even help us to think about practical or technical thinking (as opposed to scientific or theoretical thinking) as such.
