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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Davies' objection fails in medical contexts.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Biological components can be identified by anatomical position and relationships to other organs, independently of their functional roles.
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    • 2.An organ in the position characteristic of its type remains a member of that type even if it has lost some capacity characteristic of that type.
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    • 3.Therefore, a component can malfunction without ceasing to be a member of its functional type.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.In medical contexts, functional role is constitutive of biological kind membership, not merely incidental to it—as Boorse's biostatistical theory demonstrates.
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    • 2.An organ's anatomical position fixes its token identity but not its type identity, which requires reference to species-typical causal contributions to survival and reproduction.
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    • 3.Davies' objection conflates spatial continuity with functional-kind persistence, a distinction that Christopher Boorse's species-design framework explicitly prohibits in pathological classification.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Medical function attribution is normative and etiological: organs are typed by their selected effects, following Millikan's teleosemantic account of proper functions.
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    • 2.Under Millikan's framework, a structure that has permanently lost its selected causal role is no longer a fully-fledged member of its functional natural kind, regardless of positional continuity.
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    • 3.Therefore, Davies' positional criterion is insufficient to preserve type membership when the defining etiological function is absent, making his objection inapplicable to medicine's teleological ontology.
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