Abstract
From its first exposition almost half a century ago, the social model of disability has been aimed at altering both theory and practice, bringing about profound changes in people’s understanding of disability, and in the daily lives of disabled people as well. The social model’s foil, and on some accounts its antithesis, is the medical model of disability. Both models treat disability as a locus of difficulties. While the medical model takes disability to be a problem requiring medical intervention—and as both the prerogative and the responsibility of medical professionals to fix—the social model understands disability as a political problem calling for corrective action by citizen activists who alter other people’s attitudes and reform the practices of the state. These two conceptualizations of disability have been treated as competitors, as if one must prevail over and eradicate the other in thinking about who disabled people are and what should be said and done in regard to them.
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Silvers, A. (2009). An Essay on Modeling: The Social Model of Disability. In: Ralston, D., Ho, J. (eds) Philosophical Reflections on Disability. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 104. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2477-0_2
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