Javier Silva Silva

Ecosystems are routinely evaluated in terms of degradation, resilience, recovery, and restoration success, yet the conceptual status of ecosystemic health remains unresolved. This paper examines whether health can be ontologically attributed to ecosystems. We first characterise ecosystems as complex biological systems whose organisation depends not merely on the presence of organisms, but on structured networks of trophic, mutualistic, symbiotic, competitive, and biogeochemical interactions. We then adopt an ecological account of health according to which health is understood as the capacity to endure and adapt to environmental perturbations. Against this background, we ask whether ecosystems possess the forms of regulation required for health in the strict biological sense. Our conclusion is qualified. Although ecosystems exhibit adaptive capacities associated with their complex organisation, current evidence does not warrant attributing to them the specialised biological regulation required for organismic health in the strict sense. Even so, the concept is not merely decorative, as it offers a theoretically disciplined and empirically tractable framework for ecological restoration by shifting attention from species counts alone to the recovery of interactional organisation, functional relations, and adaptive capacity under disturbance.

In this article, I elaborate a proposal to overcome McKenzie’s argument against the possibility of progress-talk in metaphysics (2020). McKenzie states that said discourse is not possible in metaphysics due to its “all-or-nothing” character: either metaphysical theories are true or not, without intermediaries, so the language of approximation cannot meaningfully apply to changes between metaphysical theories. I show that discussions regarding the type of metaphysical relationship between two relata are susceptible to retention and refinement, two criteria that McKenzie considers necessary for progress, as long as they tend towards better matching what is observable in reality. This is possible if metaphysical relationship types are characterized as sets of properties, from which the Jaccard Index between two sets can be utilised to determine the degree of similarity or approximation between relationship types. If such is the case, then a transition from one relationship thesis to another can be considered progress as long as some properties are retained and the change is guided by empirical evidence. Hence, progress-talk in naturalized metaphysics is possible according to McKenzie’s own criteria.

The goal of this thesis is to propose a naturalistic definition of mental disorders. Naturalistic theories about disease generally attempt to establish what makes a biological phenomenon a disease by relying on the concept of biological function, stating that diseases and biological dysfunctions are equivalent. This implies the need to ground normative judgments on supposedly objective phenomena, which conflicts with descriptive scientific discourse and opens the gate to rebuttals on the supposed objective nature of diseases. However, at least theoretically, the failure of the dysfunction definition of disease does not necessarily imply the failure of the naturalistic programme. The claim that the usual definition of disease as biological dysfunction is not the only possible way of defining disease in a naturalistic fashion will be defended. To back the previous claim, a definition of disease that does not depend on normative nor subjective criteria will be elaborated. It is argued that the 'negative' aspect of diseases should be understood in terms of a decrease in rate of change of the probability of living until a certain moment in time, and that diseases are processes related to negative impact on the viability of a biological organism. As will be shown, this proposal has potential as a solid naturalist alternative, with which disease naturalism can withstand arguments against the supposed subjective nature of dysfunction-based theories by resorting to this new proposal. Following this line of argumentation, empirical evidence about paradigmatic cases of mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolarity and melancholy, can be invoked to argue that mental disorders can satisfy the criteria of being a disease by virtue of generating an increase in the probability of experiencing a negative impact on viability. Hence, this proposal shows promise in explaining the reason why mental disorders should be considered pathological.