Abstract

In contrast to the “normativist” view, “naturalist” theorists claim that the concept of health refers to natural or normal states and propose different characterizations of healthy and diseased conditions that are meant to be objectivist and biologically grounded. In this article, we examine the core concept of these naturalist accounts of disease, i.e., the concept of biological malfunction, and develop a new formulation of the notion of malfunction following the recent organizational approach to functions in the philosophy of biology. We focus on the notions of adaptive regulation and functional presupposition to develop a new conceptual framework that justifies the ascription of malfunctional behaviors to biological systems according to the embodied normativity of biological organizations