title: Non Aristotelian categories in medicine.
abstract: This paper discusses the representation of medical categories that can not be defined in Aristotelian sense. Two kinds of these categories are mentioned: the prototype and the family resemblance categories. Such categories obviously do exist in medical domain. Search on the Net was performed for free text definition for some commonly used medical categories, like 'autism', 'Burkitt lymphoma' and 'disease'. Most of the found often contradicting definitions do not follow the Aristotelian rules of definition. Many definitions describe statistical properties of the category that are often useless in individual cases. A simple way is suggested that makes possible to represent such categories in biomedical ontologies and treat them separate from better formed categories. This makes possible to revise these categories at any later stage of ontology development.
authors.affiliation: National Institute for Strategic Health Research, Budapest, Hungary. surjan.gyorgy@eski.hu
authors.forename: György
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Surján
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D006814:Hungary; D019359:Knowledge; D008490:Medical Informatics; D008511:Medicine / Q000145:classification*; D009626:Terminology as Topic