Functionalism

Functionalism

FUNCTIONALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

FUNCTIONALISM IN SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

FUNCTIONALISM IN PSYCHOLOGY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The term functionalism has been used in at least three different senses in the social sciences. In the philosophy of mind, functionalism is a view about the nature of mental states. In sociology and anthropology, functionalism is an approach to understanding social processes in terms of their contribution to the operation of a social system. In psychology, functionalism was an approach to mental phenomena that emphasized mental processes as opposed to static mental structures.

FUNCTIONALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Functionalism in the philosophy of mind was first systematically developed in the 1960s as a view about the nature of mental states such as sensations, beliefs, desires, and emotions. It arose in response to questions about the relation between mind and body, in the context of a debate between opposed views known as dualism and materialism. Dualism was defended by the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), who held that minds were nonphysical substances that were not located in space and indeed had no physical properties at all. A major difficulty for dualists has been to explain how mental states, if they have no physical properties, can cause or be caused by physical states of a person’s body. Materialists, by contrast, have held that there are no non-physical substances, and that mental states are nothing more than physical states.

The best-known materialist views in the 1950s were behaviorism and the identity theory. Behaviorism as a theory of the nature of mental states is sometimes called logical behaviorism to distinguish it from behaviorism as a methodological view in psychology. According to behaviorism, mental states were simply tendencies to behave in certain ways under certain circumstances. Behaviorists thus rejected not only dualism, but also the commonsense view that mental states are internal states that are causes of behavior. Identity theorists, on the other hand, held that mental states were identical with states of the central nervous system. The identity theory appeared to rule out by definition the possibility that mental states could be present in any being that did not have a human central nervous system.

Functionalism was intended to be a theory that was compatible with materialism, while avoiding the difficulties of behaviorism and the identity theory. It was motivated in part by the thought that the relation between mind and body is analogous to the relation between software and hardware in a computer. Computational states are defined, not in terms of specific hardware configurations, but in terms of their relations to inputs, outputs, and other computational states. Computational states are multiply realizable ; that is, they can be realized or implemented by a wide range of different kinds of hardware. Functionalists held that a similar approach could be taken to mental states; that is, mental states could be defined as relations between perceptual inputs, behavioral outputs, and other functional states. For example, the beginnings of a functionalist analysis of pain might point out that it is a state that is produced by potentially harmful sensory inputs, leads to avoidance behaviors, and tends to produce such other mental states as a dislike for whatever caused the pain. According to the functionalist, it is relationships such as these, not a specific physical implementation, that are essential to pain.

Functionalism seems to avoid the difficulties of the other main approaches to the nature of mental states. Because mental states, like computational states, must be implemented in a physical medium, functionalism seems to make it less mysterious than dualism how mental states can stand in causal relations with physical states of the body. Unlike behaviorism, functionalism is compatible with the view that mental states are internal causes of behavior. And unlike the identity theory, functionalism leaves open the possibility that beings very unlike humans could nevertheless have mental states.

Different versions of functionalism have been developed by different writers. The view described above most closely resembles the machine functionalism defended by Hilary Putnam in a number of papers reprinted in his Mind, Language, and Reality (1975). Somewhat different versions were defended by other writers; David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson offer a useful survey in their Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (1996), and a number of the original papers are reprinted in Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology (1980), edited by Ned Block.

The most serious difficulty for functionalism is the problem of accounting for conscious experiences, which philosophers call qualia. One thought experiment that illustrates the problem involves the apparent possibility of inverted qualia. It seems possible in principle that two people could be functionally identical even though their experiences were inverted, so that when one person saw something green, that person had an experience that felt to him or her the way an experience of something red felt to the other. If this is a real possibility, it follows that functionalism cannot be a complete account of the nature of all mental states, since if two people with identical functional properties could nevertheless have different qualia, then qualia cannot be functional states.

FUNCTIONALISM IN SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

In sociology, functionalism was a theoretical perspective that emphasized that the parts of a social system are interrelated in such a way that none of them can be fully understood except in terms of their effects on the others. The relationships between the parts of a social system constitute the structures of that system, and social structures, social processes, and other social phenomena are to be explained in terms of their functions, which are, for most theorists, their contributions to the continued stable existence of the system. The social systems to which functional analysis was applied ranged from units as small as the family to those as large as international organizations; the phenomena to which functions were imputed included social roles, social norms, devices for social control, and many others.

Functionalism originated in the late nineteenth century in the work of such thinkers as Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917); it was developed in the early twentieth century as an approach to anthropology by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) and Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942); and in the middle decades of the twentieth century, as elaborated by Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) and Robert Merton (1910–2003), it became the dominant perspective in American sociology.

Some functionalist writers were influenced by an analogy between societies and biological organisms, and their concept of social function was explicitly modeled on that of biological function. Radcliffe-Brown, for instance, in “Structure and Function in Primitive Society” (1935, reprinted in Coser and Rosenberg 1976), distinguishes between three sets of sociological problems: social morphology, which identifies social structures just as biological morphology identifies organic structures; social physiology, which identifies the functions of these structures; and development, which studies how new social structures arise, much as evolutionary theory explains the development of new kinds of organisms.

Functionalists have typically thought of the function of a social activity as its contribution to the needs of the society, especially to a social equilibrium, which tends to right itself if disturbed. Durkheim, in the first systematic development of a functionalist approach, distinguished between the cause of an activity such as the punishment of crime, on the one hand, and its function, on the other. The practice of punishment may initially be caused by an intention to deter crime or achieve justice, but its function, according to Durkheim, is to maintain our intense emotional disapproval of crime. Although a particular practice or activity may not initially be caused by a recognition of the function it will serve, Durkheim holds that its serving a useful function is nevertheless part of the explanation of the continued survival of that practice.

Malinowski, who introduced the term functionalism into anthropology, identified seven fundamental biological needs: metabolism, reproduction, bodily comforts, safety, movement, growth, and health, as well as derived needs, such as the need to produce goods and the need to regulate behavior. He held that the function of social processes was ultimately to satisfy these individual needs. Radcliffe-Brown rejected this view, going so far as to write that “as a consistent opponent of Malinowski’s functionalism I may be called an anti-functionalist” (“Functionalism: A Protest” [1949], reprinted in Kuper 1977, p. 49). Although he regarded the concept of function as central to anthropology, in his view the function of social processes was not to satisfy individual needs, but rather to support or preserve social structures. Radcliffe-Brown’s view is often called structural functionalism to distinguish it from Malinowski’s.

The sociologists most closely associated with functionalism in the mid-twentieth century were Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton. (The terms functionalism and structural functionalism are both used to describe their work.) Parsons identified four functions that any social system needs in order to achieve and maintain equilibrium. These were: adaptation, or the acquisition and distribution of resources from the environment; goal attainment, which involves determining which goals of the system have priority and determining how to achieve them; integration, which involves coordinating relationships between various social actors to enable them to function smoothly together; and latent pattern maintenance-tension management, which involves transmitting values that will keep actors motivated to act in ways that are necessary for the continued functioning of the system.

Merton’s contributions included his distinction between manifest functions, which are consequences that agents in the system recognize and intend to produce, and latent functions, which are not intended or recognized. Whereas Parsons had tended to emphasize manifest functions, Merton stressed that many important functions are latent. Merton also introduced the concept of dysfunctions, which are consequences of an activity that have negative effects on the stability of the system.

By the late 1970s, functionalism was no longer the dominant paradigm in sociology, in part because of the perceived conservatism of its emphasis on equilibrium, and its consequent lack of attention to social conflict and change, and in part because it was seen more as a set of abstract categories than as a testable empirical theory. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was some interest in a neofunctionalist sociology that attempted to preserve the insights of functionalism, especially as represented in Parsons’s work, while addressing its perceived failings.

FUNCTIONALISM IN PSYCHOLOGY

In psychology, the term functionalism refers to an American school of psychology that was influential at the turn of the nineteenth century. Functionalism developed in response to the earlier structuralist view advanced by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) and Edward B. Titchener (1867–1927). Structuralist psychology used an introspectionist methodology to attempt to identify basic elements of conscious experience into which more complex experiences, or structures, could be analyzed. Functionalism, by contrast, emphasized psychological processes rather than static psychological structures. Functionalism also stressed the role of the mind as a mediator between the environment and the needs of the organism; like the pragmatist philosophy that influenced it, functionalism held that psychological processes should be understood in terms of their effects. The most influential contributors to this school were the pragmatist philosophers William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952), and the University of Chicago psychologist James Rowland Angell (1869–1949). Although functionalism influenced later approaches to psychology, as a distinct school it faded from view in the early decades of the twentieth century, as behaviorism rose to prominence.

SEE ALSO Anthropology; Behaviorism; Durkheim, Émile; James, William; Malinowski, Bronislaw; Materialism; Merton, Robert K.; Parsons, Talcott; Philosophy; Pragmatism; Psychology; Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.; Sociology; Spencer, Herbert; Structuralism; Theory of Mind

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1997. Neofunctionalism and After. Oxford: Blackwell.

Angell, James Rowland. 1907. The Province of Functional Psychology. Psychological Review 14: 61–91.

Block, Ned, ed. 1980. Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Braddon-Mitchell, David, and Frank Jackson. 1996. Philosophy of Mind and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Coser, Lewis A., and Bernard Rosenberg, eds. 1976. Sociological Theory: A Book of Readings. 4th ed. New York: Macmillan.

Kuper, Adam, ed. 1977. The Social Anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Levin, Janet. 2004. Functionalism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1944. A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Putnam, Hilary. 1975. Mind, Language, and Reality. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Wallace, Ruth A., and Alison Wolf. 2005. Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Curtis Brown