Seth Goldwasser’s “Standard Aberration: Cancer Biology and the Modeling Account of Normal Function” published in Biology and Philosophy

Normal functions are activities that parts of biological systems are, in some minimal sense, supposed to perform. In this paper, Goldwasser argues by example that cancer biologists regularly ascribe normal functions to parts of cancers. He argues that such ascription poses difficulties for standard accounts of function, opening the way for a novel pragmatist-inspired account of function which he calls the Modeling Account of Normal Function.