Bioethical language and its dialects and idiolects

Abstract

In their search for answers to the relevant theoretical questions on importing knowledge in practical ethics, the authors take an instrumental approach to metaphor. This figure of language allows one to compare language and linguistic variants to bioethics and knowledge. As defined by the dictionary, an 'idiom' is the official language of a nation, a 'dialect' is a regional variant of an idiom, and an 'idiolect' is an individual variant of a dialect. The bioethical idiom is thus seen as a linguistic set constituting a 'bioethical nation'. Since it is situated above particular dialects, it exercises more than a regulatory role over the discipline. In this article, in order to focus on the process of transmission of knowledge in bioethics, the authors chose Diego Gracia's work as a paradigmatic reference to the question on the transculturation of dialects and the relations in bioethics which are considered 'peripheral' or 'central'. Although this researcher found the key question pointing to the core of the problem of importing dialects, he is still searching for a proper answer to the cultural/bioethical context/contradiction