A non-invasive method for determining the articular point of a joint is disclosed. The method uses a surgical navigation system having a stereoscopic cameras which tracks the positions of infrared emitting or reflecting markers attached to appendages on either side of the joint. A movable marker is used to palpate known landmarks on the appendages to determine their positions. The appendages are moved to determine the trajectories of the landmarks relative to the joint. Positional information from the cameras is fed to a data processing system with resident software which uses the positional information and trajectories to mathematically determine the position of the joint articular point according to the laws of kinematics.