Ludwik Fleck’s reasonable relativism about science

In this chapter, the research group on the project “Health and disease as practical concepts” set out the main tenets of their research program and discuss the connection of their approach with the classical American pragmatists. In this pragmatic vein, the project seeks to identify, articulate and address problematic situations from clinical practice that involve concepts of health and disease. Some of these problematic situations are briefly described, as they served to inspire the contributions to the edited volume.

Prologue: A Pragmatist Approach to Conceptualization of Health and Disease

Binney,

Bolt,

van der Linden

et al. 2024

Epilogue: Towards a Toolbox for a Pragmatist Approach to Conceptualization of Health and Disease

Schermer,

van der Linden,

Bolt

et al. 2024

In this Epilogue, we bring together the different strands of the volume, and reflect on the lessons learned in the international workshop. We discuss next questions to be asked and steps to be taken for the further development and application of our pragmatic approach. We end by tentatively proposing a ‘toolbox’ intended to give guidance to further inquire on the concept and conceptions of Disease, specific diseases, and health, as they function in numerous practical contexts.

Is There an Epistemic Role for History in Medicine? Thinking About Thyroid Cancer

Binney

2024

Starting in the late twentieth century there was considerable overdiagnosis of thyroid cancer, especially papillary thyroid carcinoma. Intriguingly, thyroid cancer researchers have suggested that knowledge of the history of thyroid cancer would have helped prevent this problem. Their intuition is that history has an epistemic role to play in justifying contemporary medical knowledge. This conflicts with an opposing intuition that history is irrelevant to the justification of contemporary knowledge. This chapter provides a Fleckian analysis of the history of thyroid cancer. It describes the development of a fluctuating network of active and passive elements of knowledge, out of which knowledge of cancer, malignancy, and papillary carcinoma emerge. What these objects are is shown to depend on this history. Whether physicians see the various forms of thyroid cancer as homogeneous kinds or as composite objects is shown to depend on this history. Therefore, the observations made of these objects also depend on this history. Justification of knowledge claims is a function of observations made of these objects, and the observations made of these objects is a function of their history. Therefore, justification of knowledge is a function of this history, which gives history an epistemic role to play in medical practice.