Abstract

If the healthy and the pathological are not merely judgments qualifiers, but real phenomena, it must be possible to define both of them positively, which, in this context, means as factual contraries. On the other hand, only a privative definition, either of the pathological as ‘non-healthy’, or of the healthy as ‘non-pathological’, can rationally circumscribe all possible states of an organism. This fluctuation between two meanings of the ‘healthy’–‘pathological’ opposition, factual vs. rational, characterizes the ordinary usage of these concepts and puts all philosophical definitions in a hopeless situation. Although a scientific definition may conceal this equivocation by adequately setting out the terms of the problem of discriminating between the ‘healthy’ and the ‘pathological’, it could explain some of the difficulties met in determining ‘gold standards’, in the choice of separators, and in the assessment of the diagnostic qualities of tests.