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    Scientific biomedical inquiry may determine that a condit... — Carmelics
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    Home/Bioethics
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Scientific biomedical inquiry may determine that a condition is a disease even when human intuition says it is not, and in such cases we should accept that judgment rather than revise the concept to exclude it.

    Truth & Knowledge
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Facts about physiological and psychological functioning obtain independently of human conceptions of the world.
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    • 2.Scientific inquiry can conclude that people with a condition are suffering from a biological malfunction even when intuitions suggest otherwise.
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    • 3.A revisionist naturalist regards health and disease as features of the world to be discovered by biomedical investigation, not constrained by everyday concepts.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Disease concepts are inherently normative: they presuppose standards of proper function that biology alone cannot supply without value-laden criteria.
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    • 2.Christopher Boorse's biostatistical theory itself relies on species-typical functioning, a standard that embeds social and evolutionary assumptions into ostensibly neutral science.
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    • 3.When biomedical inquiry classifies a condition as disease, it implicitly borrows normative premises that empirical investigation cannot itself validate, making the appeal to 'pure science' circular.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.The historical medicalization of homosexuality demonstrates that biomedical consensus can systematically encode dominant social values as pathology, not discovered biological fact.
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    • 2.Peter Conrad's sociology of medicalization and Wakefield's harmful dysfunction analysis both show that scientific disease attribution without intuitive harm criteria produces demonstrably false positives.
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    • 3.A concept that systematically overrides the harm-based intuitions of affected persons loses its justificatory authority, since those intuitions track the normative core that makes disease attributions actionable.
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    Topics

    BioethicsTruth & Knowledge

    Key Terms

    Biomedical inquiry(as the type of scientific investigation being discussed)
    Scientific research focused on understanding diseases, how bodies work, and medical treatments through careful study and experimentation.
    Disease(Boorse's biostatistical theory of health)
    Failure to conform to the species-typical design of humans; specifically, functional efficiency that is either degraded below the typical level or limited by environmental agents, understood as functioning more than a certain distance below the population mean for the relevant reference class
    Human intuition(as contrasted with scientific judgment)
    What people naturally feel or believe to be true based on instinct or common sense, without needing a logical explanation.
    Revise the concept(as what we should NOT do when science contradicts intuition)
    To change how we define or think about something based on new information or arguments.
    concept(Empiricist tradition)
    A mental representation formed from copies of sensory representations, assembled in accordance with general-purpose learning rules.

    Related

    A concept that systematically overrides the harm-based intuitions of affected pe...A revisionist naturalist regards health and disease as features of the world to ...Christopher Boorse's biostatistical theory itself relies on species-typical func...Disease concepts are inherently normative: they presuppose standards of proper f...
    +5 moreShow less
    Facts about physiological and psychological functioning obtain independently of ...Peter Conrad's sociology of medicalization and Wakefield's harmful dysfunction a...

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: health-disease
    View source passageHide passage
    Revisionist naturalists argue that facts about physiological and psychological functioning, like other biological facts, obtain independently of human conceptions of the world. Our intuitions might tell us that a condition is not a disease. But scientific inquiry might conclude that people with the condition are really suffering from a biological malfunction. In that case, a conservative would recommend finessing the analysis to ensure that the concept of disease does not cover this case. A revi
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Scientific inquiry can conclude that people with a condition are suffering from ...
    The historical medicalization of homosexuality demonstrates that biomedical cons...
    When biomedical inquiry classifies a condition as disease, it implicitly borrows...

    Similar

    Scientific inquiry can conclude that people with a condition are suffe...85%Philosophers should investigate what kinds of things diseases are onto...80%The concept of disease necessarily requires that a condition have a ca...78%Philosophers should aim to naturalize disease by first understanding g...77%
    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit