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Fig. 3.16
Linguistic variable
State-of-health
he introduced the term “disease” not as a linguistic but a social definition: There
are complex human conditions “that in a human society are termed diseases”, and
he specifies potential candidates “like heart attack, stroke, breast cancer, etc.” [66,
p. 621] In his later article [70] he also mentioned 'myocarial inforction', 'gastric
ulcer', 'diabetes mellitus', and 'AIDS'. In this article he referred to an estimation
of approxmately 50,000 individual diseases or clinical entities. He named every
phrase that denotes any of these huge amount of individual diseases a
nosological
predicate
15
that is used to predicate an individual disease attributed to a person.
Sadegh-Zadeh emphasized that all our definitions for many individual diseases
do not give us a definition of the term “disease”, “the general concept 'disease' that
comprises all these 50,000 individual diseases and is thus, as a class, something dif-
ferent from each one of its 50,000 members.” [70, p. 108] However, this may remind
us of
Bertrand Russell's antinomy
16
that usually is handled with a kind of “type
theory” and Sadegh-Zadeh also proceeds with an example to the same tune: “The
general category of birds as a class is not identical weith particyular bird species
such as robin, sparrow, crow, ostrich, and so on. We must therefore not confuse a
category with its members. Disease is the category. Individual diseases, or diseases
for short, are its members.” [70, p. 108]
3.6.3
Concepts, Categories, and Prototypes
In [70] Sadegh-Zadeh referred to the “classical, essentialist view” that reduces a cat-
egory and concept to a finite number of defining features”. This “view of
reductive
15
Nosology is the name of a branch of medicine that deals with classification of diseases.
ν
o
σ
o
ς
(nosos) is an Ancient Greek word that means “disease”, and
λ
o
για
(logia) means
“study of”.
16
“If
R
is the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. - Is
R
a member of itself? -
If we say 'yes', then this contradicts the definition of
R
as a set containing all sets that are
not
members of themselves. On the other hand, if we say 'no', then we say that
R
is a set
that is not a member of itself and that means that it belongs as a member to itself. Russell
discovered this antinomy or - more generally - paradoxon in 1901.
