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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that 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.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 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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