Specificities and vagaries of medicine from the viewpoint of hard sciences

Abstract

Among many other beautiful reflections on the ontology of medicine, in his Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine, Sadegh Zadeh promotes Fuzzy Sets Theory among the basic instruments of logic for medical understanding, highlights the importance of vagueness in the medical language and as an intrinsic property of medical epistemology, and invokes the clear advantages of a medical fuzzy taxonomy to overcome the binary concept of being healthy/ill. We briefly discuss these aspects, relating them to the peculiarity of Fuzziness as the only purely scientific notion among the foundational tools needed to define an analytic philosophy of medicine more concerned with an explicatum of the notions of health, illness, and disease than with precision and accuracy. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.