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Defining Dysfunction: Natural Selection, Design, and Drawing a Line

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Peter H. Schwartz
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Abstract

Accounts of the concepts of function and dysfunction have not adequately explained what factors determine the line between low-normal function and dysfunction. I call the challenge of doing so the line-drawing problem. Previous approaches emphasize facts involving the action of natural selection (Wakefield 1992a, 1999a, 1999b) or the statistical distribution of levels of functioning in the current population (Boorse 1977, 1997). I point out limitations of these two approaches and present a solution to the line-drawing problem that builds on the second one.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , July 2007 , pp. 364 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Thanks to Christopher Boorse, Randall Dipert, Gary Ebbs, Gary Hatfield, Harold Kincaid, Eric Meslin, Shari Rudavsky, and Alfred Tauber for conversation and encouragement regarding my work on these issues. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for Philosophy of Science for critique and questions that significantly contributed to the final product. Thanks also to audiences at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, the University of Buffalo, and Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), where I presented earlier versions of this paper.

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