Intrinsic Kinds in Internal Medicine

Abstract

What do we mean when we diagnose a patient with a disease? What does it mean to say that two people have the same disease? In this paper, I argue that diseases are natural kinds, using a conception of kinds derived from John Stuart Mill and Ruth Millikan. I demonstrate that each disease is a natural kind and that the shared properties occur as a result of the pathogenesis of the disease. I illustrate this with diverse examples from internal medicine and compare my account to alternative ontologies.

Keywords

• Disease
• Internal medicine
• Intrinsic kinds
• Pathogenesis