Healthcare, experience, and well-being: inferential thinking in the humanities and in the clinic

Abstract Objectives This article examines the notion of well-being or “happiness” – a notion articulated by Aristotle as eudaimonia and in ancient China as le (乐) – and it does so as a way of understanding the intersection of the work of the humanities and that of healthcare. Methods Its method is to interrogate the conception of experience . In both the clinic and in the humanities, engagements with experience are routed, so to speak, through inference (particularly as analyzed by C. S. Peirce), the deployment of practical reasoning in relation to experience. To be experienced is to be situated in the world, most usually by touch: at some particular place, which always entails some future place, where one is and where one is going to be. “Being experienced,” Hans-Georg Gadamer has argued, “does not mean that one now knows something once and for all . . .; rather, one becomes more open to new experiences”. Results If this is so, then the practical worldly work of what Stephen Jay Gould calls “the triumph of homology” – at the heart of the analogical thinking of the humanities – complements biomedical science in articulating the goals of healthcare: good health and well-being, for individuals and our communities. Conclusions A significant aspect of clinical healthcare is the inferential comprehension of experience pursued by the humanities.