Functional Explanation Again

[Justin Schwartz]

Not at all. If abolshing welfare didn't have that effect, then people who 
wanted to maximize profits would have an incentive to keep it, or not 
abolish it, or restore it. The functional effect is objective. It does 
explanatory work, explaining why people would want to do things that served 
a function. --jks


>
>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.
>
>DB

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