Abstract
If one had to identify the biggest change within the philosophical tradition in the twenty-first century, it would certainly be the rapid rise of experimental philosophy to address differences in intuitions about concepts. It is, therefore, surprising that the philosophy of medicine has so far not drawn on the tools of experimental philosophy in the context of a particular conceptual debate that has overshadowed all others in the field: the long-standing dispute between so-called naturalists and normativists about the concepts of health and disease. In this paper, I defend and advocate the use of empirical methods to inform and advance this and other debates within the philosophy of medicine.
Highlights
If one had to identify the biggest change within the philosophical tradition in the 21st century, it would certainly be the rapid rise of experimental philosophy
What began as a small initiative to promote empirical methods within philosophy and test the intuitions of so-called ‘armchair philosophers’, has led to a wealth of studies on the intuitions of the public concerning a diverse range of philosophical subjects in epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and even aesthetics
I have argued that it was a mistake to think of what is perhaps the oldest debate within the field - i.e. the question of how to understand health, pathology, and disease - as a debate that could be solved with conceptual analysis alone
Summary
If one had to identify the biggest change within the philosophical tradition in the 21st century, it would certainly be the rapid rise of experimental philosophy. Experimental work on scientific concepts includes early work on the gene concept [7], innateness [8,9,10], the economists’ concept of choice [11] consciousness [12], and conceptual differences between natural and social scientists more generally [13,14] It is within the philosophy of medicine that one particular conceptual debate has overshadowed all others: the long-standing dispute between so-called ‘naturalists’ and ‘normativists’ about the concepts of health and disease, i.e. whether (to put it into a slogan) these terms refer to value-free scientific concepts or valueladen social ones.
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