Robert Scott Taylor

In the philosophy of medicine, the debate surrounding accounts of health and disease is typically centered around attempts to provide a proper conceptual analysis of a singular medicalized label such as “disease” that is meant to represent all pathological states. In this paper, I take a different approach. Instead of engaging in conceptual analysis, I, through the process of conceptual engineering, attempt to redefine our concepts of health and disease to better serve us. To do so, I propose a novel hybrid account of health and disease and demonstrate how, by combining aspects of naturalist and constructionist accounts and distinguishing between two different medicalized labels —“disease” and “health condition”— my account can better serve the purposes of these concepts.