Debates about the concept of disease have traditionally been framed as a competition between two
conflicting approaches: naturalism, on the one hand, and normativism or social constructivism, on
the other. In this article, we lay the groundwork for a naturalistic form of social constructivism by (1)
dissociating the presumed link ...
Debates about the concept of disease have traditionally been framed as a competition between two
conflicting approaches: naturalism, on the one hand, and normativism or social constructivism, on
the other. In this article, we lay the groundwork for a naturalistic form of social constructivism by (1)
dissociating the presumed link between value-free conceptions of disease and a broadly naturalistic
approach; (2) offering a naturalistic argument for a form of social constructivism; and (3) suggesting
avenues that strike us as especially promising for filling in the details of an alternative approach and
addressing the most obvious objections.
