Empathic Knowing and the Completion of Care

The inescapability and importance of vulnerability and dependency is central to care ethics and commonplace in healthcare, where patients must depend on a multitude of relationships and practices of care. For some, this is not a temporary state of dependence on the way to recovery of baseline interdependence. Medical conditions can create permanent and absolute states of dependence without capacity to communicate care needs clearly. In some cases, there may be uncertainty or disagreement as to whether activities of care are received by or completed in the cared-for due to the epistemic challenges of identifying responsivity. Utilizing vignettes of dependency care in this context, we argue that these challenging cases offer epistemic insight into the subjectivity, relationality, emotionality, physicality, and particularity of empathic knowing in the completion of care.