The concepts of disease: a response

Abstract

I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on Dr Kräupl Taylor's paper. I agree with much of what he says and think that he agrees with some of what I have said. We both disapprove of Platonic realism, for which the term ‘essentialism’ used by Popper (1945) seems to me preferable, since it avoids the danger of confusion with the very different meaning of ‘realism’ in the later idealism–realism opposition. But he has misunderstood my position in the nominalist-essentialist argument; and he seems to think that my statement about the meaning of the names of diseases in medical discourse and the application of ‘modern systems of class logic’ in medicine are in some way incompatible or discordant, whereas I think they are complementary to each other.