Disentangling Context Dependencies in Biological Sciences

The aim of this paper is to disentangle two different kinds of context dependency in biological explanations by looking at explanations of cancer. One kind of context dependency is employed as an explanans in the Tissue Field Organization Theory (TOFT), where cell behavior depend on the field (the context). The other kind of context dependency—I argue—underlies both systemic and molecular accounts of cancer, and pertains the identification of the relata of the explanation more than the explanation itself. This double nature of context dependency creates an interesting unified picture of explanation, where mechanistic explanations are always possible even though a mechanistic account of the biological world is not. It also sets the conditions for a particular kind of compatibility between TOFT and molecular accounts, in which TOFT is more general and SMT’s molecular accounts—when they work—are particular cases of TOFT.