On Wed, 21 Mar 2001 11:19:24 -0500 Dennis Breslin <dbreslin at ctol.net>
writes:
> Justin Schwartz wrote:
> >
> > Functionalist explanation may be intentional. It doesn't deprive
> an
> > expalantion of its functional caharcter to say that X exists,
> persists,
> > whatever, because it promotes Y, and people put it there because
> they
> > thought it would ptomote Y. E.g., that elimianting welfare is
> promotes
> > profit-maximization, and that's why Clinton eliminated welfare.
> That's an
> > intentional-functional explanation. (See my "Functional
> Explanation and
> > Metaphysical Individualism," Phil of Science 1993.)
> >
>
> What is gained here? Identifying an agent whose efforts are
> oriented to
> particular goals seems to make function little more than a synonym
> for
> intention. Functional explanations seem to make sense in some kind
> of systems analysis where any reference to intention is metaphor
> and
> the discretion of agents becomes irrelevant.
I think that Justin is trying to assert that functional explanations are teleonomic in character. Intentional explanations are thus one species of functional explanations but they are not the only variety. Darwinian biology has shown how we can make sense of functional explanations for biological phenomena without our having to invoke a mysterious creator/designer. Functional explanations do not require intentional agents behind them. I think that what gets people confused when functional explanations are used in the social sciences, is that when we attempt to explain social phenomena in functionalist terms, the fact that people ARE intentional agents leads many people to infer that a functional explanation of a social phenomena requires that there be agents who are consciously aware of the functions in question and who are motivated to act upon them. In some cases, this may well be true but not always. The sociologist Robert Merton (father of the Nobel Prize-winning economist of hedge fund fame) drew a distinction between what he called manifest functions and what he called latent functions. The former are functions which people are consciously aware of, and which they are motivated to act upon., whereas the latter are ones that people may not be aware of, but which nevertheless are said to explain the phenomena in question.
Like Justin and Jerry Cohen, I do think that historical materialism does require the deployment of functional explanations, and I find it difficult to make sense out of many sorts of Marxian explanations unless they are interpreted as functional explanations.
Jim F.
>
> DB
>
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