Explaining Cancer: Finding Order in Disorder

Description

In Explaining Cancer, Anya Plutynski addresses a variety of philosophical questions that arise in the context of cancer science and medicine. She begins with the following concerns: BL How do scientists classify cancer? Do these classifications reflect nature's "joints"? BL How do cancer scientists identify and classify early stage cancers? BL What does it mean to say that cancer is a "genetic" disease? What role do genes play in "mechanisms for" cancer? BL What are the most important environmental causes of cancer, and how do epidemiologists investigate these causes? BL How exactly has our evolutionary history made us vulnerable to cancer? Explaining Cancer uses these questions as an entrée into a family of philosophical debates. It uses case studies of scientific practice to reframe philosophical debates about natural classification in science and medicine, the problem of drawing the line between disease and health, mechanistic reasoning in science, pragmatics and evidence, the roles of models and modeling in science, and the nature of scientific explanation. Cover Half title Explaining Cancer Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction I.1. Organization of the Book I.2. Autobiographical Note 1. Cancer: Natural, Medical, and Social Kind 1.1. Introduction 1.2. Cancer Classification in Practice 1.3. Natural Kinds and Disease Kinds 1.4. Is Cancer a Homeostatic Property Cluster Kind? A Potted History and Discussion 1.5. The End of Diseases? 1.6. Conclusion 2. From Disease to Risk 2.1. Introduction 2.2. Concerning Definition 2.3. Naturalism: Disease as Dysfunction 2.4. Problematizing Function 2.5. Objections to the Naturalist’s View 2.6. The Eliminativist View 2.7. Conclusion: From Disease to Risk 3. Causation, Causal Selection, and Causal Parity: What Genes Can (and Can’t) Do 3.1. Introduction: Genes as Causes 3.2. Putting Concepts of Causation in Their Proper Place 3.3. The Mechanistic Research Program in Cancer 3.4. Causal Selection, Causal Parity, and Genetic Disease 3.5. Conclusion 4. Evidence and Environmental Epidemiology: A Pragmatic Approach 4.1. Introduction 4.2. Evidence in Epidemiology: An Overview 4.3. Tobacco 4.4. Ionizing Radiation: The Downwinders 4.5. Summary: Evidence and Causation in Epidemiology 5. Cancer from an Evolutionary Perspective 5.1. Evolutionary Thinking about Disease: A Taxonomy 5.2. Cancer Evolving 5.3. Evolution, Modeling, and Hypothetical Explanation 6. Explaining Cancer 6.1. Introduction 6.2. Puzzle 1: Why Does Cancer Incidence Increase as We Age? The Rise of the Multistage Theory and the Path to Oncogenes 6.3. Puzzle 2: Why Don’t We Get Cancer More Often? 6.4. Concluding Discussion Conclusion Appendix: The Basic Biology of Cancer Bibliography Author Index Subject Index