How to be a Naturalist and a Social Constructivist about Diseases

Abstract

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.