The Role of Silence and Music in Philosophy

On 16 March 2026, members of the EPIC team were joined by researchers, musicians, and members of the public for an evening of philosophical contemplation, music, and meaningful silence. The event, held at St George’s, Bristol, invited guests to consider what role silence plays in music, philosophy, and everyday life. Opening the event, music therapist and NIHR doctoral student (Hull York Medical School), Kate Binnie, led guests in a moment of collective silence, prompting reflections on how silence can create space for self-knowledge as well as support deeper social connections.

Echoing these ideas, in particular the therapeutic, and sometimes necessary, role of silence both individually and interpersonally, philosopher and EPIC research fellow, Dr Dan Degerman, provided an opportunity to consider the implications of ‘breaking’ silences, particularly in the context of mental health. Degerman emphasised that, while in many cases creating opportunities for discussion around experiences of mental illness can help reduce stigma, these discourses also risk framing silence as inherently harmful or negative. 

To remedy this, Degerman proposed ways of disambiguating different types of silence, introducing two key concepts, namely, literal and metaphorical silence. Literal silence being the absence of sound when nothing is said, and metaphorical silence referring to the absence of speech when something could, or indeed ought, to be said. Degerman explained that both kinds perform an important function in everyday interactions with others, yet only some are taken to be meaningful or welcomed silences, whereas others can create discomfort. That is, whereas some shared silences can facilitate a sense of closeness, mutual understanding, and intimacy, others create ambiguity that can be experienced negatively.

Taking up the invitation to reflect on the communicative and deeply embodied role of silence, Bristol Schola Cantorum performed a piece illustrating in practice how silence and music – like two sides of the same coin – shape the way we experience sound and its absence. Joining in the discussion, University of Bristol music scholars, Professors Emma Hornby and John Pickard offered their perspectives on the role of silence in musical performance and composition, prompting reflection on the breath and the careful placement of silence in orchestral performances.

Drawing these perspectives together, speakers and panellists, including philosopher of language, Dr Anthony Everett, and EPIC Principal Investigator, Professor Havi Carel, engaged in a thought-provoking panel discussion spanning tensions in conceptualisations of silence in the West and East, and its utility – or perceived lack of – in Western analytic philosophy, to its role in palliative care. Each of these perspectives provided avenues for reflecting on the role of silence in different contexts, including healthcare, highlighting tensions between the silence that occurs when no further speech is needed and the silence that emerges as a result of communicative failures between practitioners and patients.

In my experience, the invitation to reflect on silence prompted thoughts about voluntary and non-voluntary silences, particularly in the context of my own research on the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures used to control it. While for some, the silence that followed periods of national lockdowns and widespread closures of busy, otherwise noise-filled environments was experienced as a welcome break, for others, the (relative) absence of noise, and perhaps in particular the absence of other people, was deeply distressing. That is, while silence can bring a sense of peaceful solitude in some cases, in others it can amplify feelings of social isolation and loneliness.

Hence, not only did the event provide a space to reflect on the role of silence in music and philosophy, but it also provided opportunities to reflect on silence more generally. The significance of this is especially pertinent in times of widespread upheaval and crisis, like pandemics, but also other kinds of crisis, such as war and conflict, where silence as an absence of sound could be reconceptualised as a privilege not all have access to. Overall, while silence exists in many forms, its role in society, and its seemingly neutral or passive nature, can mean it is taken for granted, and yet its significance extends beyond its communicative function – it is in many ways a way of being and relating to others and the environment of which we are a part.

Author bio

Kathryn Body is an early-career researcher working at the intersection of the medical humanities, public health policy, and qualitative health research. She has a Master’s degree in Medical Law and Ethics from King’s College London and recently completed her PhD in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. Kathryn’s PhD research analysed online qualitative survey data on the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, Japan, and Mexico, with a specific focus on embodiment and other aspects of subjective, lived experiences that came to the fore during that time. Currently, Kathryn is working as a part-time research assistant in the Anthropology Department at University College London, on a project exploring the biosocial impact of multiple caregivers in the lives of children and young adults, with a particular focus on mental health and wellbeing.

What is Public Engagement with Science?

Public Engagement with Science: Definingthe Project, coauthored by Melissa Jacquart and me, was published with Cambridge University Press in January 2025. This volume represents the culmination of years of Melissa’s and my efforts to explore the contours of what it is for academics to do public-facing work about science.

Engaging the public in science: what does this look like?

Way back in 2017, I received initial approval from my institution, the University of Cincinnati (UC), to develop a Center for Public Engagement with Science. Melissa Jacquart, also a philosopher, soon joined me at UC to co-develop the center. Initially, a lot of the work was identifying patterns in how academic science—broadly construed to include natural and social sciences, as well as other STEM disciplines—interfaces with public life. 

And, while we were interested in engagement opportunities created by the internet, our main focus from the start was how academic science interfaces with the local communities its embedded in. We quickly realized that we want to conduct and support public engagement that is (1) participant-centered, (2) interdisciplinary, and (3) community partnered. So that is the basic recipe for the UC Center for Public Engagement with Science, or PEWS.

One of Melissa’s and my early activities was to host a 2021 workshop convening academics interested in public engagement with public engagement practitioners (supported by NSF Award SES-1946951). Videos of this workshop are available on the PEWS YouTube channel. This newly published Element is our first of two planned publications summarizing our learning from that workshop—and, really, our learning from our years spent laying the groundwork for PEWS.

I like thinking of our Element as a tour of resources for and important considerations bearing on attempts to engage with the public about scientific research. Many academics, including Melissa and me, find themselves wanting to use their academic skills to engage not just with other academics but with public audiences as well. This can be motivated by the desire to share scientific content, to encourage more connections with science, or even to shift scientific research priorities toward topics of public concern. We wanted to create a volume accessible to readers from a wide variety of backgrounds who want a window into getting started with public engagement with science.

In this Element, we consider how public engagement with science is defined and what aims it might have (section 1) and explore the wide range of academic disciplines with resources to offer public engagement with science (section 2). We then consider the aims and techniques of collaborating across disciplines and with practitioners on public engagement initiatives, and we consider university structures that can support public engagement (section 3). We outline a goal-directed approach for developing public engagement with science initiatives (section 4). Finally, we consider the variety of forms public engagement can take and how public engagement can feature in research and teaching efforts (section 5).

Cambridge University Press developed the Elements format of publication to be midway between an academic journal article and a full-length book. Elements come in thematic series, all sharing the same cover illustration, and all curated by a series editor (or coeditors). Our Element is actually the first in a new series, also edited by Melissa and me, Elements in Public Engagement with Science. Together with an interdisciplinary and international Editorial Board, we are commissioning Elements on topics like STEM learning ecosystems, citizen science, children’s engagement in science, indigenous science, and more.  You can learn more about the series at its website.

Public Engagement with Science: Defining the Project is available open access, here: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009475105

Angela Potochnik is Professor of Philosophy, Head of the Philosophy Department, and Director of the Center for Public Engagement with Science at the University of Cincinnati.​  She is the author of Idealization and the Aims of Science (2017) and Science and the Public (2024), as well as coauthor of Recipes for Science: An Introduction to Scientific Methods and Reasoning (2018, 2nd Ed. 2024) and Public Engagement with Science: Defining the Project (2025). She earned her PhD from Stanford University in 2007. 

Epistemic injustice across disciplinary lines

This week, post-doc Fred Cooper reports from a GW4 residential on health inequalities and social justice.

For the last eight years, the GW4 Alliance – a consortium of universities in the south west of England and South Wales, consisting of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, and Exeter – has run GW4 Crucible, a leadership development programme, which brings together future research leaders from across disciplines and institutions to explore how they can enhance their career through interdisciplinary collaboration. The programme has been running since 2017; with over 200 alumni, it runs over the course of four months, providing two in-person residential ‘labs’ and a series of online masterclasses.

Each cohort addresses a particular problem, an urgent challenge too complicated and embedded to be tackled by any singular form of expertise. For 2024, the focus of GW4 Crucible is ‘health inequalities and social justice’, and the methodologies of ‘radical interdisciplinarity’ necessary to approach them. My application to the programme emphasised my (at that point, barely started) research on epistemic injustice, and my interest in having conversations with people that historians don’t always get to meet; such as architects, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. 

As a historian of medicine, and having worked for six years in an interdisciplinary health research centre, I began my post at EPIC with a sense that considerable numbers of researchers across disciplines are actively engaged with many of the themes and questions that animate the project, but without necessarily deploying the same kinds of language. 

Reading the profiles of my fellow ‘Cruciblees’, in anticipation of meeting them for a two-day residential in a hotel in the misty, rainy hills above Cardiff, nobody presented themselves as a philosopher; I was a rare representative, with a literary scholar, of the humanities in general. At a stage in my own work of trying to gauge the reach and purchase of literatures on epistemic injustice in the kinds of spaces that might usefully benefit from them, the structured and unstructured exchanges that Crucible offered felt like an opportunity to take a (wholly unrepresentative and unscientific) temperature. 

Over the course of the two days, discussions crystallised around six themes, developed in small groups with fluid memberships. While I couldn’t be part of every conversation, I stayed with the two subjects which seemed to show most promise for thinking on epistemic injustice across disciplines, occupied as they were with researcher positionality and lived experience, and the ethics and practice of meaningful inclusion in ‘PPI’ (patient and public involvement), here a cipher for participatory research more broadly. 

Although each of these concerns have their own distinct histories, they begin from a shared proposition immediately familiar to work on epistemic injustice in healthcare contexts; that the experience of being ill, and of becoming a patient, imparts knowledge which is 

• highly pertinent to collective and professional understandings of health, illness, disease, and medical systems; 
• impossible to otherwise come by; and 
• not easily formed, articulated, communicated, or formalised. 

Acknowledging the need for researchers to address, incorporate, and interpret lived experience, and to move towards programmes of work which are (genuinely) co-created or user-led, carries another tacit, latent acknowledgement; that the contexts and processes of health care and research as currently constituted reproduce a raft of epistemic harms, exclusions, injustices, and lacunae. Although different researchers work in different registers and are comfortable with (and able to advance) varying degrees of critique, even the most constructive, positive, ‘inclusive’ argument for greater attentiveness to experience implicitly and necessarily identifies a problem, which can only be fully understood in terms of respective epistemic power. 

Overwhelmingly, the interdisciplinary exchanges taking place in the Crucible spoke to the extensive common ground between researchers interested in problems of speaking and silence, shamed and ‘hidden’ illnesses and experiences, and how lived knowledge can be encouraged, supported, valued, and operationalised. 

The literature on epistemic injustice is, undeniably, extensive, prompting some researchers – including in past entries of this blog – to question its over-zealous application and its dilution or bland reproduction as an idea. These concerns come from very different perspectives and summations of worth, but they both chart pathologies of saturation and abundance. While this may be the case from a particular disciplinary view, discussing epistemic injustice with a broad spectrum of health researchers conferred the opposite impression: that of a highly pertinent and useful set of ideas not (yet) widely taken up, even in research that worked in almost identical spaces, on almost identical problems. 

This is not, of course, an argument that anyone’s work was (or is) ‘in need’ of a closer engagement with epistemic injustice; every Cruciblee had their own robust intellectual and practical tools, making for a compelling – and sometimes challenging – set of conversations. In broader literatures on health and healthcare, however, you can frequently find accounts of many of the phenomena discussed and taxonomized in work on epistemic injustice, but without any particular theoretical framework to interpret and organise them. 

Nobody is obliged to apply the insights of any particular literature to their work, unless, perhaps, the omission is especially glaring (or revealing of patterns of power and exploitation in the academy); but too often, in complicated work addressing multiple themes, meanings only half solidified can sometimes slip away. 

As the study of epistemic injustice moves across and beyond disciplinary lines, one of the biggest challenges will necessarily be around keeping these exchanges rich, complex, and mutually responsive. At the basic level of definition, epistemic injustice is a useful idea; where it can be genuinely transformative, though, is in the pluralism and depth of its conceptualisations, allowing us to think critically and rigorously about a number of significant barriers to health, justice, and care. 

Every discipline has something particular to offer here. For example, my work on the history of loneliness – and Michael Bresalier’s work on the history of tuberculosis vaccination – attends to how systems of knowledge and practice are built over time, in ways that fold in and perpetuate unjust epistemic phenomena. At the GW4 Crucible, I met researchers who, if they had the inclination, could use their expertise and training to take research on epistemic injustice in innovative and exciting directions. Even for a literature already experiencing some of the problems of success, that is an encouraging thought. 

Fred Cooper is a post-doctoral researcher and medical historian on project EPIC based at the University of Bristol.

Credibility attributions in healthcare

In this post, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies interviews Carme Isern Mas on a new exciting project, on the cognitive bases of epistemic injustice in healthcare. 

Kathleen: Can you tell us a little bit about your project?

Carme: This is a project funded by a Grífols Research Grant in Bioethics from the Fundació Víctor Grífols i Lucas. The main aim of this project is to explore whether people with somatic and psychiatric conditions are given less credibility than their healthy counterparts due to identity prejudice, and if so, to investigate under which conditions this is the case. To achieve this, we plan to use experimental methodology, particularly through vignette-based studies. 

In particular, we ask whether epistemic injustice in people with clinical diagnoses is influenced by the effect of the label of the diagnosis, the epistemic privileging of scientific and medical evidence, and the effect of the clinical context. We hope that this will allow us to complement the existing empirical evidence gathered through interviews, conversation analysis and questionnaires, among other methods.

Kathleen: Is your project interdisciplinary? How do you think that is helpful/valuable?

Carme: Yes, our project is interdisciplinary, and we believe this approach adds significant value to our research and to the broad discussion around epistemic injustice in healthcare. In particular, we aim to contribute to this philosophical and ethical discussion by exploring one of its main empirical claims, namely, that the testimony of people with somatic and psychiatric conditions is given less credibility than that of healthy people because of an identity prejudice. 

Therefore, our project aligns with the research programs of experimental philosophy (x-phi) and, more specifically, experimental bioethics (bio-x-phi), both deeply interdisciplinary. To that end, our team is composed of qualified researchers, including Alfred Archer, Ivar R. Hannikainen, and myself, with expertise in applied ethics, moral psychology, bioethics and experimental methodology.

Kathleen: What do you hope the project will accomplish/change?

Carme: There is a need for empirical research that studies the scope of epistemic injustice towards people with medical conditions and the factors that contribute to it. This project aims to fill this gap by conducting several studies based on vignettes that manipulate an agent’s kind of medical condition, their specific diagnosis, or the context in which they share their testimony, among other things. 

By examining the impact of these manipulations on credibility attributions, we aim to shed light on the role of negative stereotypes in shaping such attributions. In addition, this project might help us understand how credibility attributions vary in different contexts, including medical and non-medical settings, and across different psychiatric conditions. The results of this research might have implications for healthcare professionals, policy makers, and other stakeholders interested in promoting more equitable and fair practices in healthcare. 

By highlighting the mechanisms underlying epistemic injustice toward people with medical conditions, this study can inform the development of interventions aimed at reducing bias and improving the quality of care for these individuals.

Kathleen: What are the future plans for the project?

Carme: In addition to conducting studies, we aim to disseminate our findings through academic publications, conferences and other relevant platforms. We might also explore potential collaborations with healthcare professionals and institutions to include their valuable feedback and insights in our research.

Carme Isern Mas is an assistant professor at the University of the Balearic Islands, specializing in moral psychology, and applied ethics. 

Her research interests lie in topics such as blame, empathy, moral motivation and self-deception. She is also interested in the bioethics of mental health and the ethics of fame.