Do Deaf People Have a Disability?

RE C E N T LY I asked a colleague, a university professor I’ll call Archibald, whether he thought that Deaf people have a disability. “Of course they do,” he answered,“it’s common sense.” I believe that most hearing people and some Deaf people, too, would say the same thing.When my colleague called the conclusion common sense, he implied that the meanings of the words themselves answered my question.A disability is a limitation of function because of an impairment. Deaf people are limited in some functions because of an impairment of hearing.Therefore, Deaf people have a disability.That nicely closes the issue for my colleague, but it closes it too soon for us.To travel this issue with the common sense meanings of the words is to travel with too much a priori baggage. In particular, these meanings take deaf and disability to be physical attributes of individuals, like their blood pressure or eye color. A great deal follows from this biological understanding of deaf and disability, including much that Deaf people find hurtful and inimical to their interests. I propose, therefore, to suspend common sense on this issue long enough to explore the concepts of deaf and disability so we can see what was buried in both the question and the answer. How did the concept of disability arise and what purposes does it serve in our societies? In several of his works, the French philoso-