Conceptual Engineering Health: A Historical-Philosophical Analysis of the Concept of Positive Health

Abstract

AbstractInstead of defining health and disease in a traditional analytic fashion, the medical-philosophical debate is now refocusing on explicating, specifying and contextualizing concepts, which implies adapting, improving or replacing them. This new view on pragmatically formulating definitions for health and disease concepts lines up with what has recently come to be known as conceptual engineering. In this paper we analyze and evaluate the concept of Positive Health by applying the methodology of conceptual engineering. Positive Health is a concept that was developed by healthcare researchers and professionals in response to problems experienced in medical practice, and that has gained significant popularity within the Dutch healthcare system and beyond. By means of a combined historical-philosophical approach, we first explore the reasons for re-engineering the concept of health, the kind of actors involved and the outcomes and effects of this re-engineering. We then evaluate the adequacy of this reconceptualization, using Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis. We argue that conceptual engineering supports the pragmatist approach towards health and disease concepts and complements it by providing tools for critical analysis and evaluation. In turn, conceptual engineering can learn from case studies from the medical domain, such as Positive Health.