Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh (/ˈzɑːdeɪ/; Persian: کاظم صادقزاده; 23 April 1942 – 6 March 2023)[1][2] was a German analytic philosopher of medicine of Iranian descent.
In the wake of severe political and economic crisis in the country caused by the U.S. and British coup d'état against the democratically elected government of Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953,[5][6][7][8] he went bankrupt and never recovered.
At eleven years of age when entering the high school shortly after his father's bankruptcy, Sadegh-Zadeh told his parents he would become a professor of medicine in the future and provoked laughter from them.
[9] Upon finishing school education at the prestigious Ferdowsi High School in Tabriz, Sadegh-Zadeh came to Germany in March 1960 to pursue his goal as a working student and studied medicine and philosophy at the universities of Münster, Berlin, and Göttingen from 1960 to 1971 with Internship and residency 1967–1971.
[10] In an autodidactic way he specialized in the philosophy of medicine and was assistant professor and lecturer 1972–1982 and full professor of philosophy of medicine 1982–2004 at the University of Münster located in the city of Münster in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in northwest Germany.
[22] Sadegh-Zadeh conceived analytic philosophy of medicine as philosophy of medicine in the analytic tradition of philosophizing, i.e., philosophy of medicine by means of logical and conceptual analysis with its primary fields of inquiry being: Sadegh-Zadeh considered medical language an ill-structured and ill-kept extension of everyday language by adding technical terms such as "angina pectoris", "appendicitis", etc.
He demonstrates and analyzes what he claims to be the inherent vagueness of medical terms and constructs techniques for dealing with this principally ineliminable feature by means of fuzzy logic.
To this end, he introduces a comprehensive methodology of medical, including fuzzy, concept formation.
Inspired by Patrick Suppes's and Carl Gustav Hempel's works,[25][26] he bases this methodology on an explication and formalization of all methods of definition known today.
[30] Central topics include everything related to concepts and theories that are basic to clinical practice, i.e., the concepts and theories of patient, suffering, health, illness, disease, diagnosis, etiology, prognosis, therapy, and prevention.
This perspective, Sadegh-Zadeh claims, creates a fertile scientific field with a host of tasks ranging from conceptual analyses (like "what is disease?
to logical analyses – such as "is clinical decision-making computable or does it require human intelligence and intuition?"
[32] The category medical knowledge consists of statements of spatio-temporally localized facts, general hypotheses, and theories.
This communitarian and social epistemology that goes back to the Polish physician and epistemologist Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961), is profitably utilized and extended by Sadegh-Zadeh.
[37] Apart from the deontic nature of medical-practical knowledge referred to above, a second reason why Sadegh-Zadeh classifies medicine as a deontic field is his view that according to his prototype resemblance theory of disease, the concept of disease is inherently value-laden.
Sadegh-Zadeh devotes himself extensively to pure, formal, and applied ontology to use them in his logical analysis of medical-ontological issues of medical knowledge, clinical practice, nosology, psychiatry, psychosomatics, and biomedicine such as, for example, whether diseases exist or are fictitious entities invented by nosologists and physicians, and whether particular other things such as genes, psyche, and schizophrenia exist or are mere myths.
The distinction is based on a syntactic criterion similar to Barcan formula and enables differentiation between fictional entities such as Sherlock Holmes and real ones.
They do not mirror or report scientifically discovered facts in the world out there which could be independent of the conceptual system from where they are viewed and judged.
Specifically, he precisely explicates the concepts of diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and misdiagnosis to demonstrate that the truth and falsehood of all these outcomes of clinical decision-making are relative to the respective medical language and knowledge used, to methods of inquiry applied, to conceptual systems, vocabularies and terminologies constructed and proposed by scientific and professional communities, to regulations issued by health authorities, and to other factors in the health care system that impact on the actions and interactions of the diagnostic personnel.
What is worth noting, is that medicine is also a poietic science (from the Greek term ποίησις for "making, creating") that invents, designs, and produces medical devices in the widest sense of the term "making", from drugs to prosthetics to brain chips to artificial organs to artificial babies.
Comparable to the bioevolution of animal and plant species, the technoevolution proceeds as a Darwinian one by quasiself-reproduction and selection.
On the part of the technosphere, the salient yield of the coevolution is the advancing mentalization of GM, a process that human beings misconceive as artificial intelligence constructed by them.
But according to Sadegh-Zadeh's theory, this is only a myopic interpretation of the gradual, natural emergence of the intelligent and self-conscious Machina sapiens in the guise of a globally distributed machine.