Mechanisms, malfunctions and explanation in medicine

Nervi, M

doi:10.1007/s10539-009-9190-x

Cited by 35 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Although the new mechanism has been very infl uential in philosophy of science, relatively litt le work on mechanisms has been done to date in the philosophy of medicine itself. One question has to do with the nature of mechanisms of disease: for example, Mauro Nervi ( 2010 ) has argued that these should be ( 2011 ) has argued that pathological mechanisms should be understood as broken normal mechanisms. This question is still not entirely sett led.…”

Section: Philosophy Of Science and Philosophy Of Medicinementioning

confidence: 99%

Research Problems and Methods in the Philosophy of Medicine

Loughlin¹,

Bluhm²,

Gupta³

2017

The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Philosophy of Medicine

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Section: Philosophy Of Science and Philosophy Of Medicinementioning

confidence: 99%

Research Problems and Methods in the Philosophy of Medicine

Loughlin¹,

Bluhm²,

Gupta³

2017

The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Philosophy of Medicine

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“…Anyone who has been sick or injured has surely experienced the transition from the restrictive norm of disease to the expansive norm of health as one convalesces. If there is a qualitative difference between health as being more than normal and disease as involving its own constricted norms or regularities, then this suggests that they should be understood as involving distinct biological processes or mechanisms (Nervi 2010). This would seem to provide a more biologically coherent way to contextualize health judgments.…”

Section: Canguilhem's Surnaturalism: Towards a Biological Theory Of Hmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextualizing Medical Norms: Georges Canguilhem’s Surnaturalism

Sholl

2016

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

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One of the key criticisms of understanding health in terms of adaptation to one's environment is that medical judgments should be able to apply across environments. If we say that a condition is pathological 'for person X in environment E', then we quickly run into problems of desirability and social values. However, many key concepts in biology entail an inability to separate the organism from its environment. In other words, it is precisely by referring to 'organism X in environment E' that we can determine what is 'normal and natural'. In this chapter, I will argue that the role of this inseparability of organism and environment for understanding medical norms has been misunderstood and the implications of it for naturalistic theories of health and disease have gone largely unappreciated. To better understand this contextualist approach, I will discuss the ideas of John Ryle and Georges Canguilhem, focusing primarily on the latter. In Canguilhem's work we find some key arguments for why organismic norms need to be understood relative to environments and how this can help to clarify the concepts of health and disease. I will explore his peculiar form of naturalism that was based on the dynamism and variability of organisms, show how it can be clarified through more recent biological research, and mention some of its limitations.

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“…It is the way these different parts and activities are organized in a continuous spatial-temporal process that allows the SARS coronavirus to infect the host cell, then to generate and cause SARS symptoms. Of course, in the same way that there are many differences between mechanistic accounts in philosophy of biology, there are several disputes over what is a disease mechanism and whether diseases mechanisms should be viewed as fundamentally different from physiological mechanisms or not (on this controvery, see Moghaddam-Taaheri 2011;Nervi 2010). Nonetheless, most medical explanations are considered mechanistic explanations: in order to explain a disease, you need to localize and decompose the mechanism that produces the disease symptoms.…”

Section: The Existence Of Non-mechanistic Explanations In Biomedical mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanistic and topological explanations in medicine: the case of medical genetics and network medicine

Darrason

2015

Synthese

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Medical explanations have often been thought on the model of biological ones and are frequently defined as mechanistic explanations of a biological dysfunction. In this paper, I argue that topological explanations, which have been described in ecology or in cognitive sciences, can also be found in medicine and I discuss the relationships between mechanistic and topological explanations in medicine, through the example of network medicine and medical genetics. Network medicine is a recent discipline that relies on the analysis of various disease networks (including diseasegene networks) in order to find organizing principles in disease explanation. My aim is to show how topological explanations in network medicine can help solving the conceptual issues that pure mechanistic explanations of the genetics of disease are currently facing, namely the crisis of the concept of genetic disease, the progressive geneticization of diseases and the dissolution of the distinction between monogenic and polygenic diseases. However, I will also argue that topological explanations should not be considered as independent and radically different from mechanistic explanations for at least two reasons. First, in network medicine, topological explanations depend on and use mechanistic information. Second, they leave out some missing gaps in disease explanation that require, in turn, the development of new mechanistic explanations. Finally, I will insist on the specific contribution of topological explanations in medicine: they push us to develop an explanation of disease in general, instead of focusing on single explanations of individual diseases. This last point may have major consequences for biomedical research.

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Mechanisms, malfunctions and explanation in medicine

Cited by 35 publications

References 15 publications

Research Problems and Methods in the Philosophy of Medicine

Research Problems and Methods in the Philosophy of Medicine

Contextualizing Medical Norms: Georges Canguilhem’s Surnaturalism

Mechanistic and topological explanations in medicine: the case of medical genetics and network medicine

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