What Causes Sickness 1-18-25

What Causes Sickness 1-18-25
When hearing or reading about viruses in the news we are usually confronted with the picture of a particle: a thing, often coloured in red, that can infect us and thereby cause harm.

It is a powerful picture that provides us with a well-defined enemy. It also presents researchers with a well-defined target: the virus is often conceptualised as a “molecular machine” that can be isolated, disassembled, and analysed.1 The insights from this analysis can then be used to design molecules that should block the machine’s functioning.

In this three-part series of posts, I will discuss a range of findings from virology that point to fundamental flaws in the machine/thing view of viruses. A number of approaches in virology suggest that viruses should not be understood as things but rather as processes, a position John Dupré and I have discussed in more detail here. Such a shift in perspective has important implications for how we think about viruses and how we design sustainable strategies to deal with them.

In this first post, I want to look at how findings from virology support a process- rather than a thing-based view of viruses. In the second part, I will discuss why choosing a process perspective matters for scientific practice, using the example of how to deal with future viral pandemics. In the third part, I will turn to more technical philosophical issues and discuss how virology can inform debates about dispositions, intrinsic properties, and process ontology.