Some General Clarifications Related to Health and Disease

Abstract

What is health? What is disease? In the contemporary literature on health and disease, the notions of health and disease are indirectly if not directly related to other more general cognates like “(un/counter)nature”, “natural vs. artefactual kind”, “(ab)normality”, “(dys/mal)function” or “(dis)value”, without that the relationship between health, disease and these very general notions is clearly further analyzed.
My aim, in this paper, is precisely to explore the general relationship between health, disease and the different terms, which any analysis of the terms “health” and “disease” (in)directly refer to. On the basis of the two (main) intuitions that we have about what health and disease are, I proceed through a conceptual clarification of pairs of opposites i.e., from the most general to the most specific ones, the concept of nature vs. what is un/counternatural, of a natural vs. artefactual kind, of normality vs. abnormality, of functions vs. dys/malfunctions, and of values vs. disvalues. We hope to show, in this paper, that an analysis of (the concept of) health and disease shall benefit from being clear, first of all, about the different general concepts, which it is (in)directly related to. If our analysis of those concepts is correct, then health and disease are both two specific natural kinds, and their opposition can be best captured through the dichotomy (biological) functions of something good vs. (biological) malfunctions, or a certain value vs. a certain disvalue.