One might argue that concinnous reactions still reflect the self/non-self distinction, because 'abnormal' cells have lost their standing as legitimate members of the host.
The self/non-self distinction has justly been acknowledged as immunology's governing paradigm (e.g., Golub and Green 1991) and consistently defended by those committed to the self/non-self discrimination as the basis of immune function (e.g. Cohn 2015).
Accordingly, feminist critics have assailed the self/non-self distinction as a particularly vivid example of the dominance of masculine power-authority that is linked to deeper commitments of the self/other distinction as a cognitive form of objectivity (Keller 1982; Harding 1986 19911986 1991
On this view, the evoked immune response assumes the self/non-self distinction, which in turn builds on Claude Bernard's conception of a homeostatic, balanced interior that depends on the insularity of the organism: any insult to such stability results in processes to restore the original steady state as in any physiological system.
The original incarnation of the immune self arose from what appeared to be a dichotomy: During World War II, studies of skin transplantation of severely burned patients revealed an immunological barrier based on a simple self/non-self distinction: autologous or twin transplants escaped immune destruction.
Once the moral agency conceived in the Enlightenment is discarded and the agent-based epistemological models born in the same era are displaced (and the deconstruction of the self/non-self distinction in immune theory becomes important support for that move), substituting non-Western or postmodern notions of agency may be invoked.
As some authors proposed to directly relate language to nuclear symptoms of schizophrenia [21], it seems particularly important in this disorder to test the self/non-self distinction in the verbal domain.
Only by continuing to probe a diversity of host cell types with a diversity of pathogens, and by quantifying the unusual patterns common to both, will we discover the extent to which the self/non-self distinction has simultaneously driven both host and pathogen evolution.
For example, sequencing of the A. queenslandica genome has revealed a surprisingly complex complement of genes important for metazoan multicellularity, including those with known roles in cell adhesion, self and non-self distinction, immunity, controlled proliferation, cell death, and differentiation [ 23].
Among the rules are "You shall not believe that you are someone" and "You shall not believe that anyone cares about you"; America, with its hustling and self-distinction, is the hell of Scandinavian manners.
So instead of a theory based on self/non-self distinctions, our understanding of the immune system might be built on a schema that fully captures the dynamic and dialectical relationships characterizing an organism engaged in the complex internal and external environments constituted by friend and foe.
