title: Toward a Postmodern Pragmatic Discourse Semioethics for Brain Injury Care: Empirically Driven Group Inquiry as a Dialogical Practice in Pursuit of the Peircean Aesthetic Ideal of 'Reasonableness'.
abstract: A postmodern framework is proposed for conceptualizing the impact of brain injury on the subjective being of the injured person. Semiosis, the 'action of signs,' is argued as necessary for this recovery of subjectivity that escapes the mechanistic materialism and mind-matter dualism of modern science. Ethical dilemmas in brain injury care are best approached through an empirical 'semioethics' implemented as a dialogical practice among a group of selected stakeholders seeking a logical solution that best addresses the criterion of maximizing reasonableness as a tempering of rationality with relational concerns in the face of the constraints imposed by the injury.
authors.affiliation: Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Service (117A), 1201 Broad Rock Boulevard, Richmond, VA 23249, USA. Electronic address: gary.goldberg@va.gov.
authors.forename: Gary
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Goldberg
mesh_terms: D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000628:therapy*; D003142:Communication; D004954:Esthetics; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D006801:Humans
keywords: Biosemiotics; Brain injury; Ethics; Postmodern philosophy; Pragmatism; Semioethics; Semiotics