Externalist Individualism: A New Ontological Approach of Diseases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The understanding of disease in the dominant biomedical model involves two components, internalism and individualism, which jointly give rise to an ontological approach towards patients that can be referred to as atomism. I argue against such an approach in philosophy of medicine. I focus on internalism, showing that the inevitable presence of the notions of biological function and statistical normality in the biomedical model renders internalism about diseases untenable. Additionally, I argue that the new externalist individualism offers an alternative ontological approach that escapes the challenges to which the atomistic approach is exposed regarding both the concept of disease and medical practice. Subsequently, I focus on an implication of this new approach which relates to the idea of diseases as natural kinds, demonstrating that it proposes a concept of diseases as natural kinds that is conceptually consistent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".