Why medicine needs a shared language
A name begins a conversation. A shared concept lets us ask whether we mean the same thing.
Two physicians look at the same scan and disagree about whether a patient has "progressed." They are not disagreeing about the image. They are using one word for two different concepts. This essay follows that ordinary failure back through the story of Babel, the first Greek questions about names and being, and Aristotle's categories, and then separates two questions that medicine keeps confusing: what kinds of things there are, and how we know what we claim.