PhronesisWhat they found
In “Discovering clinical phronesis” (Boudreau, Wykretowicz, Kinsella, Fuks & Saraga, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 2024), a team re-analyzed eleven interviews with respected, experienced physicians across nine specialties, asking not how doctors decide ethics but how they practice. They name the result clinical phronesis and describe it in five dimensions: ethos (character, formed by models and values), clinical habitus (embodied know-how), encountering the patient (attentive, caring engagement), reasoning amidst complexity (working in uncertainty and contingency), and embodied perceptions (gut feelings, intuitions, a tacit clinical sense). The throughline: a doctor's wisdom is not mainly a set of propositions. It is largely perceptual, habitual, and tacit.
Language you can touch
That is exactly the shape of tacit knowledge — what we know but cannot fully tell (Polanyi). And it is what the companion note Tacit Knowledge Is Language You Can Touch tries to name: tacit knowing is articulate competence carried in a different medium — not the mouth but the hand, the eye, the present. Read that way, their embodied perceptions and clinical habitus are not vague residue left over after the “real” reasoning. They are a grammar laid down by thousands of cases, one the body reads off a patient faster than it can be spoken. The doctor's gut sense is language — touched, not told. Their phenomenology is a portrait, in one profession, of exactly that: knowing that lives where the words run out, at the point of contact.
Reasoning amidst complexity
Their fourth dimension — judgment under uncertainty — sits next to two notes here. Illness is a displacement from a ground state, and care is the practiced art of finding a return path (see the framework's displacement). And the case itself is often un-shortcuttable: it has to play out, the course can't be fully pre-computed, the diagnosis is reached by living the encounter, not by solving it ahead of time (see Kinds of Un-shortcuttability). Phronesis, on this reading, is acting well before the case resolves — because it must be acted in, in the patient's present, not waited out.
The doctor's gut is a grammar the body reads off a patient faster than it can be spoken.
What this is
A dialogue, plainly — not a contribution to their field. Their empirical, peer-reviewed phenomenology is the substance and the evidence; this only offers a vocabulary — tacit-as-touch, displacement and ground, the un-shortcuttable present — that names what they described, put forward for argument. It is not clinical research, it is not peer-reviewed, and it does not claim that this studio's phronesis is theirs. It is a reader's response, in good faith, to work worth responding to.
Source: Boudreau JD, Wykretowicz H, Kinsella EA, Fuks A, Saraga M. “Discovering clinical phronesis.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 2024. PMC11076326. Companion: Tacit Knowledge Is Language You Can Touch.