How to Be a Naturalist and a Social Constructivist about Diseases
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5195/pom.2021.18Keywords:
Disease, Dysfunction, Normativism, Naturalism, Social ConstructivismAbstract
Debates about the concept of disease have traditionally been framed as a competition between two conflicting approaches: naturalism, on the one hand, and normativism or social constructivism, on the other. In this article, we lay the groundwork for a naturalistic form of social constructivism by (1) dissociating the presumed link between value-free conceptions of disease and a broadly naturalistic approach; (2) offering a naturalistic argument for a form of social constructivism; and (3) suggesting avenues that strike us as especially promising for filling in the details of an alternative approach and addressing the most obvious objections.
References
Allen, Colin and Marc Bekoff. 1995. “Biological Function, Adaptation, and Natural Design.” Philosophy of Science 62, no. 4: 609–22. https://doi.org/10.1086/289889.
American Psychiatric Association. 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.
Anscombe, G.E.M. 1957. Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Austin, J.L. 1952. “How to Talk: Some Simple Ways.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 53: 227–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544519.
Boorse, Christopher. 1975. “On the Distinction between Disease and Illness.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 5, no. 1: 49–68. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265020.
———. 1977. “Health as a Theoretical Concept.” Philosophy of Science 44, no. 4: 542–73. https://doi.org/10.1086/288768.
Broadbent, Alex. 2019a. “Health as a Secondary Property.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70, no. 2: 609–27. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axx014.
———. 2019b. Philosophy of Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, G.A. 2011. “How to Do Political Philosophy.” In On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, 225–35. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Conrad, Peter and Joseph W. Schneider. 1992. Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Cooper, Rachel. 2002. “Disease.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33, no. 2: 263–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0039-3681(02)00018-3.
———. 2007. “Can It Be a Good Thing to Be Deaf?” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 32, no. 6: 563–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/03605310701680940.
Crouch, R.A. 1997. “Letting the Deaf Be Deaf: Reconsidering the Use of Cochlear Implants in Prelingually Deaf Children.” Hastings Center Report 27, no. 4: 14–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/3528774.
Cummins, Robert. 1975. “Functional Analysis.” Journal of Philosophy 72, no. 20: 741–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/2024640.
———. 1983. The Nature of Psychological Explanation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Davies, Paul Sheldon. 2001. Norms of Nature: Naturalism and the Nature of Functions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Duffin, Jacalyn. 2005. Lovers and Livers: Disease Concepts in History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Engelhardt, H. Tristram. 1976. “Ideology and Etiology.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 1, no. 3: 256–68. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/1.3.256.
Ereshefsky, Marc. 2009. “Defining ‘Health’ and ‘Disease’.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40, no. 3: 221–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2009.06.005.
Frankfurt, Harry G. 1971. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1: 5–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/2024717.
Garson, Justin. 2019. What Biological Functions Are and Why They Matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Glackin, Shane Nicholas. 2010. “Tolerance and Illness: The Politics of Medical and Psychiatric Classification.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 35, no. 4: 449–65. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhq035.
———. 2019a. “Grounded Disease: Constructing the Social from the Biological in Medicine.” The Philosophical Quarterly 69, no. 275: 258–76. https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqy063.
———. 2019b. “Review: Philosophy of Medicine by Alex Broadbent.” BJPS Review of Books. http://www.thebsps.org/reviewofbooks/glackinonbroadbent/.
Griffiths, J.O. 2021 (forthcoming). “Bioethics, the Ontology of Life, and the Hermeneutics of Biology.” In Phenomenology of Bioethics: Technoethics and Lived-Experience, edited by Susi Ferrarello, Dordrecht: Springer.
Griffiths, Paul. 2009. “The Distinction between Innate and Acquired Characteristics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/innate-acquired/.
Griffiths, Paul E. and John Matthewson. 2018. “Evolution, Dysfunction, and Disease: A Reappraisal.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69, no. 2: 301–27. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axw021.
Hempel, Carl G. 1965. “The Logic of Functional Analysis.” In Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science, 297–330. New York: Free Press.
Jones, Elis. 2021. “Distinguishing Regeneration from Degradation in Coral: The Role of Value.” Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03023-9.
Kant, Immanuel. 1999 [1781]. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kass, Leon R. 1975. “Regarding the End of Medicine and the Pursuit of Health.” The Public Interest 40: 11–42.
Kingma, Elselijn. 2010. “Paracetamol, Poison, and Polio: Why Boorse’s Account of Function Fails to Distinguish Health and Disease.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61, no. 2: 241–64. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axp034.
———. 2013. “Health and Disease: Social Constructivism as a Combination of Naturalism and Normativism.” In Health, Illness & Disease: Philosophical Essays, edited by Havi Carel and Rachel Cooper, 37–56. Abingdon: Routledge.
———. 2014. “Naturalism about Health and Disease: Adding Nuance for Progress.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 39, no. 6: 590–608. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhu037.
Kitcher, Philip. 1993. “Function and Design.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 18, no. 1: 379–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1993.tb00274.x.
———. 1996. The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities. London: Penguin.
Kukla, Rebecca. 2014. “Medicalization, ‘Normal Function’, and the Definition of Health.” In The Routledge Companion to Bioethics, edited by John D. Arras, Elizabeth Fenton and Rebecca Kukla, 515–30. London: Routledge.
Lane, Harlan, Robert Hoffmeister and Benjamin B. Bahan. 1996. A Journey into the Deaf-World. San Diego, CA: Dawn Sign Press.
Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2016. Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Matthewson, John and Paul E. Griffiths. 2017. “Biological Criteria of Disease: Four Ways of Going Wrong.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42, no. 4: 447–66. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhx004.
McLaughlin, Peter. 2001. What Functions Explain: Functional Explanation and Self-Reproducing Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McShane, Katie. 2004. “Ecosystem Health.” Environmental Ethics 26, no. 3: 227–45. https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics200426314.
Megone, Christopher. 1998. “Aristotle’s Function Argument and the Concept of Mental Illness.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 5, no. 3: 187–202. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/28251.
———. 2000. “Mental Illness, Human Function, and Values.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 7, no. 1: 45–65. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/28331.
Millikan, Ruth Garrett. 1984. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 1989. “In Defense of Proper Functions.” Philosophy of Science 56, no. 2: 288–302. https://doi.org/10.1086/289488.
Mossio, Matteo, Cristian Saborido and Alvaro Moreno. 2009. “An Organizational Account of Biological Functions.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60, no. 4: 814–31. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axp036.
Nagel, E. 1961. “The Structure of Teleological Explanations.” In The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, 401–27. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Neander, Karen. 1991. “Functions as Selected Effects: The Conceptual Analyst’s Defense.” Philosophy of Science 58, no. 2: 168–84. https://doi.org/10.1086/289610.
———. 1995. “Misrepresenting and Malfunctioning.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 79, no. 2: 109–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00989706.
———. 2017. A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Nordenfelt, Lennart. 2018. “Functions and Health: Towards a Praxis-Oriented Concept of Health.” Biological Theory 13: 10–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0270-x.
Papineau, David. 2009. “The Poverty of Analysis.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 83, no. 1: 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8349.2009.00170.x.
Parfit, Derek. 1995. “Equality or Priority?” The Lindley Lecture. Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas. http://www.stafforini.com/docs/Parfit%20-%20Equality%20or%20priority.pdf.
Powell, Russell and Eric Scarffe. 2019. “Rehabilitating ‘Disease’: Function, Value, and Objectivity in Medicine.” Philosophy of Science 86, no. 5: 1168–78. https://doi.org/10.1086/705520.
Raup, David M. 1966. “Geometric Analysis of Shell Coiling: General Problems.” Journal of Paleontology 40, no. 5: 1178–90. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022336000061643.
Searle, John R. 1979. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Simon, Jeremy. 2007. “Beyond Naturalism and Normativism: Reconceiving the ‘Disease’ Debate.” Philosophical Papers 36, no. 3: 343–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/05568640709485206.
Thompson, Michael. 1995. “The Representation of Life.” In Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, edited by Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence and Warren Quinn, 247–96. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wakefield, Jerome C. 1992. “Disorder as Harmful Dysfunction: A Conceptual Critique of DSM-IIIR’s Definition of Mental Disorder.” Psychological Review 99, no. 2: 232–47. https://doi.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.99.2.232.
———. 1996. “Dysfunction as a Value-Free Concept: A Reply to Sadler and Agich.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 3: 233–46. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/245097.
Wright, Larry. 1973. “Functions.” Philosophical Review 82, no. 2: 139–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183766.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
- Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
- The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
- Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
- The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
- Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
- The Author represents and warrants that:
- the Work is the Author’s original work;
- the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
- the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
- the Work has not previously been published;
- the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
- the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
- The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.
- The Author agrees to digitally sign the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work.
