specifikhet

Specifikhet is a concept used to describe the quality of being specific—of pointing to a particular object, term, or outcome rather than to a broad or general category. It denotes the degree to which something narrows a reference and distinguishes it from other possibilities. In Swedish the noun is specifikhet, while Danish and Norwegian use closely related forms such as specificitet. The term spans several disciplines, including science, medicine, linguistics, and everyday language, and is often contrasted with related ideas such as generality, precision, and accuracy.

In diagnostics and statistics, specificity is a formal measure of a test’s ability to correctly identify those without a condition. It is the proportion of true negatives among all people who do not have the condition, commonly expressed as TN/(TN+FP). A test with high specificity yields few false positives, meaning it rarely indicates disease when none is present. Specificity is usually considered alongside sensitivity, which measures how well a test detects those with the condition.

In biology and biochemistry, specificity refers to the selective interaction between molecules, cells, or receptors and their targets. Enzyme specificity describes preferential catalysis of particular substrates; immune specificity refers to the ability of antibodies or T cells to recognize specific antigens. In linguistics and information science, specificity describes how narrowly a term or query identifies its referent or results.

Overall, specifikhet captures the essential idea of precision and targeted identification across contexts, while recognizing the trade-offs that may occur with other evaluative properties.