ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that through adoption of the appropriate theoretical approach and the derivation of suitable analytical categories, the definition problem can be seen as operational, nontrivial, and highly problematic to the determination of health care policy. It explores the theoretical approach to the problem. The chapter deals with Thomas Kuhn’s approach to the understanding of scientific development, an approach that views scientific progress as arising primarily out of scholarly debate within the particular scientific profession in question. It illustrates the development of thinking in the field of the psychology of intelligence, and then applied to the definition problem in health, generating a proposed new set of categories for resolving the definition problem. In a society in which the system of production tends to dominate the pattern and dynamics of social organization, rather than vice versa, it can be expected that experiential health would tend to wane in the face of the more “appropriate” functional health.
