Medical theory and its notions of definition and explanation

Abstract

This chapter elucidates several special features of the usage of the notions definition and explanation in medicine and medical theory. As these special features are intimately connected to the key concept of disease entity, the first section gives a short reconstruction of this concept. The second section presents three methods of defining disease entities, supplemented by a fourth, logically unsound method found in many medical textbooks. The third section shows that there are two senses of explaining symptoms and pathological conditions by referring to disease entities, i.e., a part-whole kind of explanation and a causal one. The relationship between explanation and diagnosis of diseases is analyzed by comparing their logical structure. In the last section, the very special kind of explanation found exclusively in medicine, viz., explaining why some condition is a disease or is pathological, is clarified by elucidating the concept of pathologicity and its criteria.