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Fuzziness, Philosophy, and Medicine
Rudolf Seising and Marco Tabacchi
From the 1980s, the Iranian-German physician and philosopher of medicine Kazem
Sadegh-Zadeh discussed the nature of health, illness, and diseases and the meaning
of these notions in medical sciences. He has just published the
Handbook of Analytic
Philosophy of Medicine
[3] (to which the topic you are reading is a companion)
where, in more than 700 dense and detailed pages, he presents the work of his
lifetime; in our view this topic is qualified to be the starting point of a new discourse
in the fields of Theoretical Medicine and Philosophy of Medicine!
In his
Handbook
, Sadegh-Zadeh uses two scientific theories that, while studied
and regarded in many different sectors of hard and human sciences, are not globally
well-known in Philosophy of Medicine: Fuzzy Set Theory and Structuralism. The
following sections will briefly discuss those approaches.
1.1
Fuzzy Logic and Medicine
Fuzzy Set Theory is a discipline that was founded in 1964/65 by the electrical engi-
neer Lotfi A. Zadeh (Berkeley). This theory was applied for decades in many parts
of science and technology (such as Control, Data Mining, Economy, and many oth-
ers) and there are many researchers in mathematics and other fields who continue
the theoretical framework of this theory. In the 1970/80s some scientists created
approaches an methods to use Fuzzy Sets in modelling Medical Knowledge and
building Medical Knowledge-based Systems (or Medical Expert Systems) - e.g
CADIAG - but, as far as we know, Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh was the only scientist
in Theoretical Medicine who used this theory for a new approach to Analytical
Philosophy of Medicine. That kind of perspective could be very beneficial to the
Philosophy of Medicine as a whole.
Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh demonstrated that concepts such as health, illness, or dis-
ease “are not amenable to classical logic”, and adopted a fuzzy-theory approach to
postulate a novel theory of these concepts: “health is a matter of degree, illness is
a matter of degree, and disease is a matter of degree”. He rejected the conceptual
opposition that an individual could be either healthy or ill. In fact, health and ill-
ness are, in this philosophy, particular fuzzy states of health. In Sadegh-Zadeh's
