Explanatory Legitimacy Theory

Background and Theoretical Foundation

Looking back in history to civilizations that predated the emergence of industrialization, medical knowledge, and technological sophistication, the grand category of disability did not exist. Rather, the identification of, worth of, and community response to those who acted and appeared in ways that were considered to be atypical were inferred on the basis of context-embedded value judgments about attributed explanations for why individuals did not fit within conceptualizations of typical. And while definitions and responses have changed over time, contextually embedded values still form the basis for defining and analyzing disability. Thus, the influence of multiple factors (including but not limited to natural, chronological, spiritual, and intellectual trends) on value judgments is the key to understanding categorization, the legitimacy of individuals and groups who fit within a category, and the responses that are deemed legitimate for members.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, three contextual factors—(a) economic productivity; (b) medical knowledge, technology, and professional authority; and (c) diversity—have had significant roles in definitions of what is typical, how phenomena that fall outside of the typical are explained, and the differential and complex determination of these explanations as legitimate disability status and response.

These factors have intersected to produce two overarching and hotly debated views of disability in the current literature: medical-diagnostic and constructed. Medical-diagnostic definitions locate disability within humans and define it as an anomalous medical condition of long-term or permanent duration. Thus, within this conceptualization, the domain of disability definition and response remains within the medical community. In opposition, however, to what was perceived as a pejorative, the constructed school of disability emerged. Within this broad theoretical category, disability is defined as a set of limitations imposed on individuals (with or even without diagnosed medical conditions) from external factors such as social, cultural, and other environmental influences. Both categories of thinking provide a forum for rich debate and intellectual dialogue. However, as the discourse expands and is applied to increasingly more fields of study and application, analysis of what disability is and is not calls for theoretical specificity that can address the complexity of disability within the larger context of human diversity.

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