David Stoellger
University Bielefeld
In this paper I argue that communicable diseases, especially when resulting in asymptomatic carriers, pose an under-appreciated difficulty for the prevalent conceptions of the term ‘disease’. Prevalent accounts be it naturalist, normativist or eliminativist cannot be straight-forwardly applied. I argue that the trouble can be made clear by examining the normativist approaches’ focus on harms of disease afflicting individuals: it cannot capture how the transmission of an infectious entity itself may be a harm that afflicts populations as a whole and thereby extend beyond the individual. While transmission is facilitated by symptoms, which may not be deemed a detriment to have to an asymptomatic individual themselves, transmission itself, as the communication of the infectious entity itself, may be a symptom of infectious diseases that is inherently social. Thus, a pragmatist definition of communicable diseases ought to incorporate a clear distinction between an infectious entity and all symptoms, including transmission. This calls for need to include objective criteria of communicability, while still being dependent on evaluative and social judgements.
Chair: Cristina Somcutean
Time: September 6th, 14:40-15:10
Location: SR 1.007
SOPhiA 2026 