Social explanation and social function: An investigation of the nature of functional explanation for the social sciences.

Abstract

Chapter Four argues that functional explanation in the social sciences should employ social proper functions. As in biology, this requires the ability to make the connection between the consequence of the trait (contribution-to-survival) and the current presence of the trait (persistence-over-time). This leads to a discussion of selection mechanisms and the explanatory work required of them within the social sciences.

Chapter Two begins with some comments about the nature of social theories. A brief review of the history of the social doctrine of functionalism follows, along with a more substantial discussion of some of the classic criticisms and the explanatory problems that require resolution in order to have successful functional explanation within the social sciences.

Chapter Three explores in some depth the issues that arise in the debate regarding functional explanation in biology. I outline the explanatory goals of the two accounts of biological functions, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each account, and thereafter, address whether the explanations produced by these accounts appear to be complementary parts of a larger explanatory text. I supplement some of my arguments with analytical exercises.

The main point of this dissertation is to explore the nature of functional explanation and to see how, as an explanatory scheme, it may be adapted to naturalistic explanation in the social sciences.

Having completed my attempts to cash out functional explanations in causal terms, I suggest that such explanations in the social sciences may be understood as ultimately non-teleological and causal, as in biology. When social mechanisms are used to explicate the contribution-to-survival/persistence-over-time connection between the consequence of the trait and the current presence of the trait, the social sciences can create a viable concept of functional explanation---one that can successfully resolve the classic criticisms of the social doctrine of functionalism.

Chapter One explicates the main philosophical themes in the study of explanation. In subsequent chapters I endorse a view of explanation that attempts to be consistent with some of the theoretical insights discussed in this chapter, particularly those of Wesley Salmon, Peter Railton, Paul Humphreys, Larry Wright and Harold Kincaid.