SMT or TOFT How the Two Main Theories of Carcinog

Authors: Baptiste Bedessem Stéphanie Ruphy

Publish Date: 2015/04/08

Volume: 63, Issue: 3, Pages: 257-267

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Abstract

The building of a global model of carcinogenesis is one of modern biology’s greatest challenges The traditional somatic mutation theory SMT is now supplemented by a new approach called the Tissue Organization Field Theory TOFT According to TOFT the original source of cancer is loss of tissue organization rather than genetic mutations In this paper we study the argumentative strategy used by the advocates of TOFT to impose their view In particular we criticize their claim of incompatibility used to justify the necessity to definitively reject SMT First we note that since it is difficult to build a nonambiguous experimental demonstration of the superiority of TOFT its partisans add epistemological and metaphysical arguments to the debate This argumentative strategy allows them to defend the necessity of a paradigm shift with TOFT superseding SMT To do so they introduce a notion of incompatibility which they actually use as the Kuhnian notion of incommensurability To justify this socalled incompatibility between the two theories of cancer they move the debate to a metaphysical ground by assimilating the controversy to a fundamental opposition between reductionism and organicism We show here that this argumentative strategy is specious because it does not demonstrate clearly that TOFT is an organicist theory Since it shares with SMT its vocabulary its ontology and its methodology it appears that a claim of incompatibility based on this metaphysical plan is not fully justified in the present state of the debate We conclude that it is more cogent to argue that the two theories are compatible both biologically and metaphysically We propose to consider that TOFT and SMT describe two distinct and compatible causal pathways to carcinogenesis This view is coherent with the existence of integrative approaches and suggests that they have a higher epistemic value than the two theories taken separately

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