The "self/non-self" model is based on reasoning by analogy, which has long been decried by epistemologists, as is the use of metaphors borrowed from social life, which lead us to think of the body's self-normativity as a community of competing pathogens (pathogens tolerated by the "self" as endogenous entities) but sufficiently unified to fight against potentially aggressive external agents. The explanation of a vital norm from the functioning of a social norm is a postulate that lends itself to various objections (abusive extrapolation of the historically situated model of the liberal economy in the field of the living, etc.).
For all that, the criticism of the analogical interpretation of the immune phenomenon does not imply the failure of any attempt at theorization. The contemporary theoretical crisis of immunology should rather give it a new impulse, as it is clear that a science needs a structuring framework of intelligibility to be able to progress and coordinate its fields of research. In this context open to intellectual creativity, the researchers of Axis 3 will try to progressively increase their power over the next five years, in order to be able to participate in the international effort to elaborate new theoretical tools capable of understanding an immune process with a paradoxical status, at the same time closed and tolerant to the non-self, stable and interactive.