The Exposome and the Social Sciences: The Case of Systemic Diseases
Résumé
This chapter discusses the challenges of an epistemological pluralism. It assesses the tensions internal to the exposome as part of a longer history of epidemiology, and as opportunities to have the exposomic knowledge interact with the social sciences of health. This chapter looks specifically at the case of systemic diseases of (supposedly) “unknown causes”. Those diseases may indeed be studied as a “case”—in the meaning of “case” recommended by Passeron et Revel (2005), i.e. a door likely to open broad research avenues from an empirical narrow object and scale. From the case of systemic diseases, we examine how the bio-mechanistic approach to the causes of diseases does not exclude, on the contrary, the search for other avenues likely not only to improve the management of the patients by an interdisciplinary approach, but also to produce valuable outcomes about inequalities in health, for the own sake of the social sciences.
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