Exploring metaphor’s effects in reasoning on vaccination

Abstract

The paper investigates the impact of the use of metaphors in reasoning tasks concerning vaccination, especially for defeasible reasoning cases. We assumed that both metaphor and defeasible reasoning can be relevant to let people understand vaccination as an important collective health phenomenon, by anticipating possible defeating conditions. We hypothesized that extended metaphor could improve both the argumentative and the communicative effects of the message. We designed an empirical study to test our main hypotheses: participants were presented with a text about vaccination, described in either literal or metaphorical terms, based on uncertain vs. safe reasoning scenarios. The results of the study confirmed that defeasible reasoning is relevant for the communicative impact of a text and that an extended metaphor enhances the overall communicative effects of the message, in terms of understandability, persuasion, perceived safety and feeling of control over the health situation, collective trust in expertise and uptake of experts’ advice. However, the results show that this effect is significantly nuanced by the type of defeasible reasoning, especially in the case of participant’s trust in expertise and commitment to experts’ advice.

The explanatory function of metaphor scenario in the Serbian pro-vaccine discourse

“…Medical discourse in particular is one of the specialized discourses that has received extensive attention from the scholars dealing with the topic of science popularization (Balteiro 2017, Boginskaya 2022, Ervas, Salis & Fanari 2020, Joffe & Haarhoff 2002, Maci 2014, Navarro i Ferrando 2021, Nerlich & Halliday 2007, Williams Camus 2009. This topic is important as ordinary people are interested in becoming familiar with a discourse pertaining to their different medical conditions so as to make the right decisions or because they simply want to broaden their knowledge on certain matters affecting their physical or mental health.…”

“…Even a brief look at media texts in the three-year period to come shows that the pandemic has also been heavily metaphorically represented. A number of studies investigating the metaphorical conceptualization of Covid-19 and its portrayal in various types of the media (Ervas et al 2020, Pérez-Sobrino et al 2022, Semino 2021, Silaški 2023, Silaški & Đurović 2022a, 2022b) carry important implications for the issue of simplifying scientific Covid-19 discourse.…”

“…Therefore, in this paper we investigate how metaphor scenarios (Musolff 2006(Musolff , 2016a were exploited as a tool of explanation in the Serbian pro-vaccine discourse to render complex scientific knowledge about vaccines in a more accessible manner to aid understanding. Analysing a data set gathered from several Serbian electronic news media sources, we focus on the ways "revitalized" (Ervas et al 2020) and enriched conventional metaphor scenarios are used to help simplify complex medical knowledge and promote vaccine effectiveness. Our analysis shows that various metaphor scenarios were employed by medical experts in an attempt to depict several related aspects of the Covid-19 viral disease to the target audience in a more intelligible way.…”