Hufendiek, James & van Riel 2020 - Introduction Social Functions

Social Functions in Philosophy Social functions and functional explanations play a prominent role not only in our everyday reasoning but also in classical as well as contemporary social theory and empirical social research. This volume explores metaphysical, normative, and methodological perspectives on social functions and functional explanations in the social sciences. It aims to push the philosophical debate on social functions forward along new investigative lines by including up-to-date discussions of the metaphysics of social functions, questions concerning the nature of functional explanations within the social domain, and various applications of functionalist theorizing. As such, This is one of the first collections to exclusively address a variety of philosophical questions concerning the nature and relevance of social functions. Rebekka Hufendiek is an Assistant Professor at the University of Basel. Her research interests lie in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, particularly in empirical and ideological dimensions of research on cognitive and behavioral features. Her book Embodied Emotions: A Naturalist Approach to a Normative Phenomenon (Routledge 2015) provides a noncognitivist theory of emotions. Daniel James is a Postdoc at Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf. His historical research concerns the intersection of Hegel’s metaphysics with his political philosophy. With a view to contemporary debates in social philosophy, he is interested in the concept of social power and its fruitfulness for social-scientific inquiry, as well as in social dispositions and their connection to social-structural explanation. Raphael van Riel holds a position as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Duisburg-Essen, where he directs a research group that focuses on theories of explanation. In his book The Concept of Reduction (2014), he offers a novel explication of reduction claims in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. Social Functions in Philosophy Metaphysical, Normative, and Methodological Perspectives Edited by Rebekka Hufendiek, Daniel James, and Raphael van Riel First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Rebekka Hufendiek, Daniel James, and Raphael van Riel to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-35132-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43539-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra Contents Preface Introduction vii 1 R E B E K K A H U F E N D I E K , DA N I E L J A M E S , A N D R A P H A E L VA N R I E L 1 The Empirical Issues in Functional Explanations in the Social Sciences 18 H A RO L D K I N C A I D 2 Do Organizations Adapt? 28 DA N I E L L I T T L E 3 Social Dysfunctions 45 H E I N E R KO C H 4 In Search of the Missing Mechanism. Functional Explanation in Social Science 70 R A P H A E L VA N R I E L 5 From Natural Hierarchy Signals to Social NormEnforcers. What Good Are Functional Explanations of Shame and Pride? 93 R EBEK K A H U FEN DIEK 6 What Explains Social Role Normativity? 122 CH A R LOT T E W I T T 7 The Social Function of Morality A N DR EAS MÜ LLER 135 vi Contents 8 The Function of Gender as a Historical Kind 159 M A R I M I K KO L A 9 Function Without Intention? A Practice-Theoretical Solution to Challenges of the Social Domain 183 A MR EI BA HR 10 Revealing Social Functions through Pragmatic Genealogies 200 M AT T H I E U Q U E L O Z 11 Social Organisms. Hegel’s Organizational View of Social Functions 219 DA N I E L J A M E S Notes on Contributors Name Index Subject Index 247 249 253 Introduction Rebekka Hufendiek, Daniel James, and Raphael van Riel Why Social Functions Matter When we talk about an object’s function, we usually have in mind a particular type of effect of an event the object is involved in, which is beneficial in some way, either for the object itself or for something else. Social functions are effects that are beneficial at a societal level. Social functions thus appear to differ from paradigmatic functions of human artifacts, or functions of human organs, whose effects are located at the individual level. Eating, watching television, or doing sports seem to serve some individual needs. But they may also have some social function – like maintaining society as a whole or contributing to the well-being of the public. Typically, however, when we consider social functions, we consider not only functions whose effects concern the societal level, but, rather, functions whose bearers are social objects, or at least involve some social dimension. Classifying social objects in terms of their functions plays a crucial role for our conceptualization of social reality. It is common wisdom that the function of schools and universities is to educate, that the function of money is to serve as a means of exchange, and that the function of newspapers is to distribute information. Prima facie, it seems that many ordinary conceptions of social reality involve function ascriptions. At least sometimes, we classify things in terms of the social functions they have or are believed to have (think of the various institutions and procedures in a democracy which are involved in an electoral system; or the mechanisms of state intervention in market economies). An investigation into the nature of social functions may thus inform us about some aspects of our ordinary conception of social reality, but also, to the extent that this conception gets it right, about social reality itself. An important idea in the history of the social sciences, and also in philosophy, has been that some alleged social functions need to be uncovered. It need not be an a priori matter that the function of schools is to educate, but it is not some deeply hidden fact about social reality either. Whereas some alleged functions of institutions seem to be due to explicit intentions of those who “designed” these institutions, some 2 Rebekka Hufendiek et al. authors have suggested that many social functions are due to processes beyond intention or design and are, as a consequence, more difficult to identify. So, identifying functions or offering well-grounded functional explanations may inform us about the structure of social reality, but doing so may be a difficult task. One crucial question here concerns the concept of a benefit. In many cases, we may be in a position to spell out the concept of a beneficial effect in terms of an effect which meets success conditions determined by some particular intention or goal. But sometimes, beneficial effects are independent of explicit intentions or goals. Social traits were considered to meet universal human needs (Malinowski 1944); they were considered to be in the (objective) interest of some groups in a given society and, via satisfying these interests, were thought to contribute to their own continued existence; and they were taken to contribute to the existence of a social whole (Radcliffe-Brown 1952). All these accounts, however, raise further philosophical questions and problems. The concept of a benefit is key to understanding another reason for why social functions have been at the center of attention in the social sciences for quite some time, a reason already hinted at above: uncovering social functions may give an insight into dependencies among social processes or institutions and, thus, provide us with explanations. At a very abstract level, we can put this point as follows: as we have just seen, beneficial effects may be construed as effects which contribute to the continued existence of some social trait, of some social object, or satisfy presumed universal human needs (which, if necessary for the continued existence of the human species, may hence contribute to the continued existence of society as well). Uncovering such dependencies will provide us with an explanation of why some social trait continues to exist; it may shed light on the stability of a system, and it may, potentially, provide us with some general understanding of the organization of society. Finally, in addition to purely descriptive purposes, we may resort to social functions when we justify social facts or subject institutions to moral criticism. Political exchange about the adequacy of an institution will typically involve reflection on the expected functional effects of the institution. At the same time, appeal to social functions may become a forceful element of social critique, namely, when we can show that an institution does not live up to its own standards, i.e. when institutions fail to fulfill the function which would otherwise justify their existence. It is easy to find examples where it may not be obvious whether an institution really serves its official purpose (if any), rather than some other, quite different and perhaps not so pleasant purpose; consider, for instance, particular behavioral patterns of intellectuals (Bourdieu 1979) or social inequalities (Tilly 1998). It is because of these aspects that we may care about social functions. We conceive of social reality in terms of social functions; yet uncovering Introduction 3 functions or offering solid functional explanations is a difficult affair. The normativity involved in the concept of a beneficial effect raises ontological questions. At the same time we often justify the existence of institutions or patterns in terms of their (alleged) functions, and appeal to functions may support various forms of critique. Further questions arise concerning the history of function talk in the social sciences and its relation to biological functions. We now turn to a quick look at the history of social functionalism. History – A Short Overview Historically, the notion of a social function traces back to the emergence of sociology and anthropology as autonomous areas of inquiry in the 19th century (although it has its precursors in the theories of 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers such as Millar and Ferguson in Scotland and Condorcet and Turgot in France, see Harris 1968). This period is also considered the heyday of social functionalism, which, in the narrow, widely accepted sense of the term, encompasses a large family of macrosociological theories arising in the mid-19th century broadly unified by the aim to account for various parts of a social system in terms of their function for the maintenance or stability of this system as a whole (for an overview of the varieties of social functionalism, see Turner and Maryanski 1979). In a broad sense, social functionalism encompasses any theory that aims to explain the nature, existence, persistence, or resilience of some entity in terms of its social function, so as to include not only theories historically associated with this term, but also many sociological and philosophical theories that do not operate under this name. Several threads of the history of social functionalism in this broad sense are tightly intertwined with the analogy between biological and social phenomena that underpins the very idea of functional explanation in social science. Broadly, we can distinguish two versions of this analogy, depending on which account of functional explanation in biology serves as its source. The first version is the analogy between social entities and living beings, both maintaining themselves through the maintenance of their parts. The second version is the analogy between social function bearers and biological traits, both resulting from adaptation to a given environment. The former version underlies an organizational view, and the latter a selectionist view of social functions and functional explanation in the social domain. Although social functionalism is a fairly recent theoretical development, the organismic version of the biological analogy underlying early social functionalism has a far longer historical pedigree and is, indeed, just about as old as the concept of an organism itself, tracing back to ancient and, later, early modern theories of the “body politic” (for an overview of the history of this analogy, see MacLay 1990). However, not 4 Rebekka Hufendiek et al. until the early 19th century was this analogy elaborated into a full-blown model of society intended to support a particular kind of explanation. This endeavor has resulted in a view of social functions which assumes that societies are – analogous with living beings – self-maintaining systems and accounts for social functions in terms of an objective teleology. We can find an early version of this view in G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Analyzing Hegel’s account as a predecessor of what is nowadays called the organizational view is the main subject of Daniel James’s contribution to this volume. Although Hegel rarely figures among the protagonists in the dominant narrative about early social functionalism, his theory arguably influenced the social theories of several among those authors who undoubtedly are. These theories include Karl Marx’s conception of capital as an “organic unity”, in particular as presented in the Grundrisse (see Marx 1858 – cf. Meaney 2002). Somewhat more controversially, they may also include Émile Durkheim’s conception of society as a functionally integrated system, and Talcott Parsons’s view that shared internalized social norms explain the stability of society (see Durkheim 1902; Parsons 1951; cf. Knapp 1982, 1985, 1986). However, despite its – more or less hidden – influence on his early functionalist successors, many of them took issue with the objective teleology implied in the version of the organizational view developed by Hegel. Thus, we can identify one crucial thread extending from Hegel with the effort to exorcize the apparent teleological implications of the organizational view (see Turner 1986, 21–22) – an effort that still finds its echo in contemporary debates over functional explanations in the social sciences. Among the early social functionalists making use of the organismic analogy, most ink has arguably been spilled on the one who prominently coined the term “social organism,” that is, Herbert Spencer (see Spencer 1893). Interestingly, Spencer is also widely regarded as one of the founding figures of social evolutionism, which had its heyday in the latter half of the 19th century and faded after the turn of the century.1 It is, however, by no means clear whether any of the early theories of social evolution also amounted to an etiological theory of social functions in the sense that has been the focus of contemporary discussions (see “Functions in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Biology” section). For, although many of these theories, at least implicitly, relied on some notion of adaptation they often tied to social functions, and, in some cases, also identified causal mechanisms that facilitated social evolution, it is doubtful whether they understood this notion in the sense of a social selection mechanism (Giddens 1981). Indeed, as some commenters have – often critically – remarked, most, if not all of these theories were arguably committed to a developmentalist (as opposed to a selectionist) understanding of social evolution, meaning that they took social evolution to be a process in which some disposition of the society in question manifests itself. This is true even of those early social Introduction 5 functionalists who, such as Marx, explicitly invoke Darwin (Sanderson 2016). For this reason, it would be anachronistic and, indeed, misleading to confound talk of social evolution among the early social functionalists with a specific understanding thereof modeled after Darwinian evolution. 2 The same is arguably true even for later social functionalists such as Parsons (see Gould 1977; van Parijs 1981). Despite this overall commitment, some of the classic social evolutionists already identified specific causal mechanisms that facilitated evolutionary social change and, thus, anticipated the contemporary selectionist view.3 However, this view of social functions would not be elaborated before the revival of social evolutionism in anthropology against the background of the so-called “modern synthesis” of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics in the 1930s and 1940s. Social anthropologists, like Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, did not try to uncover selectionist processes; instead, they engaged in what is today often interpreted as functional analysis (see “Functions in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Biology” section). The goal was to analyze the functional organization of a social system. Individual cultural practices, institutions, or traits were considered to contribute to the stability of a social system, without being recognized by those involved in the system and thus bypassing explicit goals or intentions of individual agents. A now-famous example is that of the rain dance (also employed by Robert K. Merton). People gathering to perform this dance were hoping for rain. Gatherings of this sort, however, were assumed to contribute to social stability by reinforcing group identity – that was considered their function, independently of whether gatherers held a corresponding belief or intention. As Raphael van Riel points out in his contribution to this volume, Radcliffe-Brown took the hypothesis that social wholes are functionally organized systems to be a viable hypothesis. The hope was to identify laws of causal organization that are general in the sense that we encounter them across all societies. Functionalism, in this sense, was thus closely tied to a conception of the social sciences oriented towards the virtues of the natural sciences, and functional analysis was supposed to uncover the laws of social organization. In a slightly different spirit, Malinowski (1944) developed a view according to which social institutions serve universal human needs, such as hygiene. Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski were both opposed to historical approaches to culture and society; the actual development of social institutions did not play a role in their work. Accordingly, functional analysis did not serve the purpose of explaining the etiology of social institutions. As van Riel argues, Radcliffe-Brown thereby manages to offer social functional explanations without committing to a selection mechanism of the sort criticized by Elster (see “Functions in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Biology” section). 6 Rebekka Hufendiek et al. More recently, theories of social evolution have become prominent again. In his contribution to this volume, Matthieu Queloz highlights an underappreciated tradition of “pragmatic genealogy” that traces back to authors who describe fictional states of nature ranging from David Hume and Thomas Hobbes to Miranda Fricker and Philip Pettit. Such pragmatic genealogies end up ascribing social functions to particular concepts or practices which one does not necessarily expect to have a social function at all. On Queloz’s interpretation, these genealogical explanations are dynamic models that primarily reveal and ground ascriptions of functionality, but which can then be used in more or less ambitious ways to explain the resilience or even the persistence of concepts or practices. Idealizing a bit, we thus arrive at the following picture: social theory which invokes notions of social functions has been associated with (i) selectionist, (ii) developmentalist, (iii) organizational, and (iv) analytical approaches, the former, (i) and (ii), taking a historical perspective, whereas the latter, (iii) and (iv), do not. Often, social functions have been regarded as a means to assimilate the social sciences to the natural sciences. Once the view that we can theorize societies in analogy to organisms became suspect, more local versions of social functionalism have been developed. These developments raise the question of what social functions are, and what theoretical or explanatory role reference to social functions may play. Issues concerning the explanatory and theoretical role of functions, in general, have mainly been discussed in connection with biological functions. The next section will thus broaden the perspective to provide some theoretical background on philosophical theories of functions in general, many of which have been inspired by the philosophy of biology. Functions in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Biology It is widely agreed that in some cases, functionality arises from intentions or intentional actions of individuals. And some functions in the social realm may arise straightforwardly from intentions associated with the function bearer. Dan Little, in his contribution to this volume, focuses on how interacting though different intentions of individuals determine the ability of organizations to adapt to novel situations. The guiding idea is that multifaceted individual intentions give rise to various mechanisms, which may determine the potential for organizational change. Functionality which is independent of intentions or goals has received particular attention by philosophers, in particular in the philosophy of the life sciences. Biologists and physiologists ascribe to the heart not only the causal property but also the function of pumping blood. They use terms such as “neurotransmitter” or “receptor” to describe entities Introduction 7 not in terms of size, shape, and motion, but of their functional role in the behavior of a system (Craver 2013). Psychologists and anthropologists often provide functional explanations of cognitive and behavioral human features. For instance, it has been suggested that punishing behavior has the function to maintain and stabilize cooperation (Bowles and Gintis 2011), or that cultural learning has the function to quickly adapt to information-poor environments (Henrich and Henrich 2007). Accordingly, both general philosophy of science and philosophy of biology have a long history of inquiring into the nature and the value of such function ascriptions and functional explanations. Two different views of functional explanation have been particularly prominent in recent decades: the etiological theory and functional analysis (or causalrole theory). The etiological theory holds that the function of an entity is what explains why it is there or why it has the structure that it has (Wright 1973). Most etiological theorists tell a story about the causal origin of the function bearer and, thus, commit themselves to a particular kind of feedback relation: X is part of a system S and does Y. By benefiting system S, Y leads to the reoccurrence of X. Accordingly, to have a function, an item must instantiate a type whose tokens are (or once were) disposed to have certain effects. A functional item must have the right kind of history, in which the effects of the items have led to the reproduction of the type they are tokens of (Millikan 1984, 1989; Neander 1991a, 1991b, 2017). The core idea is that the function of an item is to do what it was selected for. In functional explanations of this kind, phylogenetic natural selection is the standard mechanism assumed to underlie such selection processes (however, other kinds of selection like cultural selection might explain selected functions as well). Etiological explanations of social items are highly prominent in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology but have often been criticized for their conjectural nature. Functional analysis is the view that takes functions to be causal roles performed by components of complex systems. Functional analysis demands an explanatory strategy that has to define a system within which the functional item is embedded (Cummins 1975). Drawing on Carl Hempel, Robert Cummins argues that functions just are the causal roles that a part has in relation to the system as a whole. Cummins’s ideas are currently undergoing a revival in the debate about mechanist explanations (Craver 2007; Bechtel 2008; for a reductivist interpretation, see van Riel 2014). According to the new mechanists, we can ascribe functions to parts or components of systems that realize certain activities, where the relevant components can be described as mechanisms. Therefore, to ascribe a function is to describe why the mechanism does what it does. If we make use of functional descriptions, we have to consider the nested architecture of biological or social systems made of 8 Rebekka Hufendiek et al. mechanisms organized in higher-level mechanisms. Functional analysis often assumes that the ontological status of a function can ultimately be unpacked in causal terms, such that whether a particular causal role for a system as a whole is relevant will inevitably depend on our perspective. It can be more or less adequate with regard to the underlying causal structure, but a relevant description of the mechanisms within a system and their functions ultimately relies on our decisions as to what matters in the respective system (Craver 2013). Such mechanistic explanations, including the analysis of functions as causal-role functions, have been widely accepted in current philosophy of science but hardly discussed with regard to the social sciences. Philosophers of science have discussed the difference between analytic and etiological accounts as a difference in explanatory aim, as well as a difference in metaphysical and normative assumptions. Those who highlight the difference in explanatory aim also highlight that etiological theories and functional analysis are not mutually exclusive but rather asking slightly different questions (Godfrey-Smith 1993; Griffiths 1993; Huneman 2013). Both the etiological and the causal-role theory hold that functions play an important role in explanations, but they differ in how they describe that role. Examples of questions paradigmatic etiological accounts aim to answer are: “Why do we have a heart?” or “Why do we have universities?” The etiological answer to such questions is a causalhistorical reconstruction, which accounts for the existence of these things in terms of the real or intended benefit. By contrast, functional analysis aims to answer how-questions like “how does the heart work?” or “how does the university deliver education?” where the answer is a description of what the heart or the university do within the relevant system (that distinction is widely accepted and goes back to Ernst Mayr’s distinction between questions raised by physiologists and questions raised by evolutionary biologists, see Mayr 1961). The etiological account assumes that the function of X being Y explains the presence of X, whereas the causal-role theorist assumes that the function of X being Y explains or contributes to an explanation of the general proper activity of a system which includes X (McLaughlin 2000; Huneman 2013). With regard to ontological assumptions, the main difference between the etiological account and functional analysis is that the etiological account defends a realist concept of function according to which certain kinds have functions as a result of a history of selection, in which earlier tokens of the kind served a purpose for the (biological or social) system in question. A function, according to this account, is an objective property that is acquired through a process of selection. As a (highly disputed) consequence, an item that accidentally happens to serve a function does not have a function in the relevant ontological sense. This consequence has inspired harsh criticisms of functional explanations in the social sciences: Elster has argued that since we typically lack any idea Introduction 9 of the selectionist mechanism which is required for a functional explanation in the social domain, most attempts to functionally explain social facts are doomed to fail.4 This issue directly leads us to the normative dimension of functional explanations. This dimension is closely tied to the metaphysical one since the fault line running through the metaphysical dispute seems to follow the question of norm and value. To characterize something as having a function is to view it as a means to an end. But in what sense does such a characterization presuppose a valuation of the relevant end? Is such a value intrinsic or relative to a particular perspective (McLaughlin 2000, 4)? The standard position functional analysts adopt commits them to a mechanistic worldview, suggesting that “the causal structure of the world is disenchanted and purposeless,” and that “functional descriptions … presuppose a vantage point on the causal structure of the world, a stance which intentional creatures take when they single out certain preferred behaviors as worthy of explanation” (Craver 2013, 134). Etiologists object that such a perspectivalist account cannot adequately capture the function-dysfunction distinction. This shortcoming creates practical problems, since … physiologists are interested in explaining pathological processes (such as the growth of tumors), as well as normal ones. A component can have a Cummins function [a causal role function in Cummins’ sense of the term] because of its causal contribution to an organism’s malignancy. Thus, even if we accept that Cummins’ account might allow token malfunction, it will, in some explanatory contexts, turn the function-dysfunction distinction on its head. (Neander 2017, 54) The concept of a mal- or dysfunction has played a crucial role in the social sciences as well. For instance, Durkheim considered some states of a society in terms of anomie, and Merton argued that mal- or dysfunctional effects play a core role in the study of society (see Heiner Koch’s contribution to this volume, which highlights the role of dysfunctions in accounting for social change). Although the etiological and the causal-role theory continue to dominate the debate over functions and functional explanation, alternative accounts have emerged in the last few years. One such account worth mentioning because of its historical pedigree and its more recent currency is the organizational theory of functions. Defenders of this account propose that we can account for both the teleological and normative dimension of functions in terms of the notion of a closed and differentiated self-maintaining organization (Mossio, Saborido and Moreno 2009, 815). Organizational differentiation is a process within which a system generates and maintains distinct structures that each contribute in a 10 Rebekka Hufendiek et al. distinct way to the self-maintenance of the system of which they each are a part. Organizational closure is the mutual dependence among distinct structures that constrain and thereby result: structures that constrain and thereby maintain each maintain each other’s activity. Jointly, they amount to self-determination. Based on these two notions, the organizational account identifies functions with contributions to the selfmaintenance of a system which are due to organizational differentiation and closure. Through organizational closure, a self-determining system contributes to the maintenance of the conditions of its own existence. Mossio and Bich (2017) identify the conditions of the system’s existence of a circular causal regime maintained by the activity of its components with the goal of its organization. In this sense, (biological) organization is supposed to be teleological. In his contribution to this volume, Harold Kincaid offers a simple characterization of functional explanations that does not commit to teleology or a normatively loaded concept of beneficial effects. Instead, Kincaid discusses the conditions under which the social sciences can offer adequate empirical evidence for functional explanations. He argues that it is very common in the social sciences to identify some positive aspect of a social practice and to infer from that that the practice exists in order to provide that aspect. Such inferences, however, are unsubstantiated unless we can find evidence that the practice in question persists because of its positive consequences. Such evidence is often not offered. This is a main reason for the bad reputation of functional explanations, where in principle it is possible to present functional explanations as solid causal explanations. Rebekka Hufendiek, in her contribution to this volume, discusses functional explanations of pride and shame to demonstrate that in the case of functional explanations of cognitive and behavioral traits sufficient evidence for functional explanations (understood as causal explanations) can hardly ever be offered. As a consequence, she suggests to understand functional explanations as eclectic explanations that entail elements of rational and interpretive modeling. Normativity As we stated in the beginning, when we talk about an object’s function, we usually mean a type of effect of an item, which is beneficial in some way, either for the item itself or for something else. It seems that when we ascribe a function to an entity this sets a standard according to which we can judge the entity in question. A knife has the function to cut, so we can judge whether a knife is good or not by asking whether it cuts well or not. The same is true for social functions. If the function of traditional newspapers is to spread information, we can judge them on the question of whether they fulfill this function appropriately. Introduction 11 Two questions arise from that: what kind of normativity is this? And: what is its source? A weak answer to the first question is that functional descriptions ground instrumental normativity: when we assume that the function of a knife is to cut, while maintaining that it is not the function of a fork to cut, it seems rational to use a knife instead of a fork if we want to cut something. We may even say that we should use a knife when we want to cut something. A stronger claim would be that cutting is, in some sense, an essential part of what a knife is, and that sets a standard to tell good and bad knives apart. This distinction matters when applied to the social domain: if newspapers are spreading false information, we might want to say that they fail to fulfill their function of disseminating true or valuable information. If distributing information is an instrumental function, what follows from that is that in case that true or valuable information is what we want, we should turn to other sources. If spreading true or valuable information is constitutive of being a newspaper, that sets a normative standard we can draw on to distinguish good from bad newspapers and criticize media politics, without invoking independent moral or other evaluative premises. Most accounts that offer a stronger understanding of the kind of normativity that can be grounded in function descriptions do so by making strong ontological commitments in answering the second question. We have seen in the previous section that claims about normativity being grounded in functions are closely related to metaphysical claims about the objectivity of functional properties. The Neo-Aristotelian tradition draws on a particularly strong conception of how to describe the relation between functions and norms, suggesting that the function of something is part of its nature and that having a function sets a standard that can ground noninstrumental norms. Several Neo-Aristoteleans have defended that we can even refer to functions to ground normative judgments on what is morally good and bad to do (Nussbaum 1992; Foot 2001; Thomson 2008). Alasdair MacIntyre argues that a social practice is a socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to this form of activity are realized (MacIntyre 1981, 187). Social practices have an internal normativity that follows from their nature, their history, and their level of expertise. This sets a standard according to which we can speak about good or bad political practices, excellent or lousy guitar playing, or a wonderful teacher in a noninstrumental sense. Social practices do not need to be measured with regard to the question of whether they serve a particular purpose of some agent or whether they are in everybody’s best interest. In being functional they set their own purposes and standards. In a similar vein, Charlotte Witt (2011, this volume) argues that social roles demarcate ways of being a person (being a mother, being a professor, etc.) that normatively structure our agency. Following Aristotle, Witt assumes that, first, a social role is constituted by a function and, 12 Rebekka Hufendiek et al. second, that by being functional social norms are irreducibly normative. Such Aristotelean accounts stand in contrast not only to ascriptivist accounts but also to naturalist accounts that offer etiological explanations of social functions. As we have already seen in the previous section, etiologist explanations explicitly aim for an objective understanding of functional properties that can ground claims on what is functional, malfunctional, or dysfunctional and thereby set a normative standard from which actual facts can deviate. Different meanings of malfunction and dysfunction and the relation between ontological commitments and explanatory fruitfulness are discussed in Heiner Koch’s contribution to this volume. As Koch points out, the most interesting feature of social dysfunctions is their tendency to promote social change. The field in which the normative standard set by etiological explanations is tested most radically for its vindicative or debunking powers is the vibrant literature about the evolution of morality. As Andreas Müller shows in his contribution to this volume, etiological explanations of morality that take morality to be a biological adaptation and assume that the truth of moral judgments can be reduced to the function morality was selected for, hardly seem convincing. Müller discusses the more promising vindicative accounts developed by Philip Kitcher and Philip Pettit asking whether they are more successful in meeting the naturalist challenge and account for true moral judgments in a natural world. Both Kitcher and Pettit assume that morality has the social function of solving certain problems and both take this function to play a central role in the vindication of morality. Some authors concerned with social functions adopt a mechanistic world view, claiming that functions do not exist objectively and independent of human ascriptions. Instead, functions in the social domain originate in collective ascriptions. A paradigmatic case is that of money. We collectively ascribe the function of being a means of exchange to pieces of printed paper within a particular currency union, thereby imposing a normative status (Searle 1995). A status function is a function its bearer can only perform in virtue of the fact that the community in which the function is performed assigns a particular status to the object, person, or entity. By assigning status functions we create institutional facts (concerning money or presidents), determined by constitutive rules, as opposed to regulative rules, and these institutional facts have deontic powers (see Searle 2010). The interesting normative dimension here is that the ascriptive account spells out the rights, authorizations, obligations, permissions, duties, etc. that belong to the social domain and explains them as the result of the ascription and acceptance of status functions. On this view, all genuinely political power is a matter of status functions, and because status functions require collective recognition “all genuine political power comes from bottom up” (Searle 2010, 165). Introduction 13 Outlook: Some Implications for Social Metaphysics In the emerging fields of social ontology and social metaphysics, social functions have, so far, received little explicit attention compared to other social phenomena such as social institutions, practices, structures or social kinds. However, some philosophers have explicitly invoked social functions to account for the nature, the unity, the persistence, and the existence of social phenomena. As such, social functions are, again increasingly, invoked to do important explanatory work in social metaphysics. In this last section, we will provide an overview of some such uses which appear to be most important for the contributions assembled in this volume. We can find a particularly promising area of application for the notion of a social function in the metaphysics of social kinds. Outside of debates in social metaphysics, some theorists of kinds in both the biological and social domain have already suggested that the members of at least some putative kinds are grouped together primarily because they share the same causal history, rather than the same causal profile (see Dupré 2004; Bird 2008; Garson 2011; Khalidi 2013). Whereas the latter groupings are similar because of laws of nature, the former are so because of a historical copying process. Echoing Millikan’s distinction between “eternal kinds” on the one hand, and “historical kinds” on the other, Khalidi has coined the term “etiological kinds” for them (see cf. Millikan 1984, 1999, 2000, 2005, 307–308; Khalidi 2013). Most philosophers take biological kinds to be paradigms of etiological kinds. However, Khalidi explicitly notes that “some social kinds are etiological” (Khalidi 2013, 130, footnote 4), as well. Likewise, although Millikan has tailored her account to biological kinds, she explicitly extends it to include various artifactual and social kinds (see Millikan 1999, 56–57; cf. Elder 2004). Thus, she has already laid the groundwork for a theory of social kinds in etiological terms, a theory that carries over many of the metaphysical implications of her etiological theory pertaining to both functions and their bearers to the social domain. A prominent recent elaboration of such a theory within the field of social metaphysics is Bach’s account of gender as a “natural kind with a historical essence” (see Bach 2012). Explicitly drawing on Millikan’s as well as other recent accounts of kinds tailored to biological species, he claims that gender kinds are nonarbitrary by virtue of their historical essence, which depends on a distinctive social copying mechanism, namely gender socialization, through which gendered individuals are reproduced (cf. Griffiths 1999; Millikan 1999). Thus, the property in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind men or women is participation in a lineage: an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral men or women, that is, they must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a gender system replicates gender roles. The background assumption is that the dual-gender system had a stabilizing 14 Rebekka Hufendiek et al. effect and that gender roles were culturally selected for this effect (Bach 2012). Because of this, men and women are, on Bach’s account – by their very nature – historical and, therefore, social-functional kinds. Bach’s account is motivated by explanatory a well as political considerations. For one thing, he takes this conception of gender kinds as natural kinds with historical – and functional – essences to provide a better foundation for our inductive practices; for another, he takes it to provide a better foundation for feminist politics. In her contribution to this volume, Mari Mikkola objects to Bach’s account on both explanatory and political grounds. As we have seen already, social functions raise particular ontological questions, where they can’t be sufficiently explained by reference to intentions or intentional actions alone. In her contribution to this volume, Amrei Bahr discusses cases of artifact functions that seem hard to explain by reference to individual intentions. She suggests to bring social practices into the picture to solve the problem. Sally Haslanger, for example, has pointed out that “[s]ocial practices are not fully intentional, as such, but neither are they mere regularities in behavior such as blinking or squinting in bright light” (Haslanger 2018, 237). Bahr suggests that practices turn initially unintended effects into social functions, whereas these functions can then serve to individuate the respective social practices. These recent examples from the emerging fields of social ontology and social metaphysics suggest that there is yet a lot of ground to cover in exploring the explanatory power of social functions in accounting for the nature of social reality, as well as on other, prima facie nonsocial phenomena. With the contributions assembled in this volume, we hope to not only further bolster the case for social functions in philosophy but also shed light on the metaphysical, normative, and explanatory dimensions of social functions that bestow such power on this notion. Acknowledgment We would like to express our gratitude to the DFG for generous funding of the Network “Social Functions in Philosophy.” Notes 1 For a recent historical overview of social evolutionism, see Sanderson (2016). 2 As Kenneth Bock put it, in their work, “we find, apart from polite kudos and an occasional turn of phrase, no real utilization of Darwinan theory” (Bock 1980, 38; cf. Lopreato 1990, 193). 3 For an overview of the causes facilitating social evolution identified by some of the classic evolutionists, and Spencer, Morgan, and Tylor, in particular, see Sanderson (2016, 21–27). 4 See van Riel’s contribution to this volume; see also Pettit (1996) for an alternative reconstruction of functional explanation in the social domain, Introduction 15 Kincaid (2007) for the claim that in some cases social sciences can detect selectionist mechanisms through causal modeling, and Little in this volume for a reconstruction of organizations in terms of micro-processes, some of which favor functionalist interpretations while doing justice to the requirement that function ascriptions require particular mechanisms. References Bach, Theodore. 2012. “Gender Is a Natural Kind with a Historical Essence.” Ethics 122, no. 2: 231–272. Bechtel, William. 2008. Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience. New York; London: Routledge. Bird, Alexander. 2008. “Causal Exclusion and Evolved Emergent Properties.” In Revitalizing Causality: Realism about Causality in Philosophy and Social Science, edited by Ruth Groff, 163–178. London; New York: Routledge. Bock, Kenneth. 1980. Human Nature and History: A Response to Sociobiology. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. 2011. A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Craver, Carl. 2007. Explaining the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. “Functions and Mechanisms: A Perspectivalist View.” In Functions: Selection and Mechanisms, edited by Philippe Huneman, 133–158. New York: Springer. Cummins, Robert. 1975. “Functional Analysis.” Journal of Philosophy 72, no. 20: 741–764. Dupré, John. 2004. “Human Kinds and Biological Kinds: Some Similarities and Differences.” Philosophy of Science 71, no. 5: 892–900. Durkheim, Emile. (1902) 1986. De la division du travail social: Etude sur l’organisation des societes superieures. Paris: PUF. Elder, Crawford. 2004. “Artifacts and Other Copied Kinds.” In Real Natures and Familiar Objects, 131–162. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foot, Philippa. 2001. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garson, Justin. 2011. “Selected Effects and Causal Role Functions in the Brain: The Case for an Etiological Approach to Neuroscience.” Biology and Philosophy 26, no. 4: 547–565. Giddens, Anthony. 1981. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press. Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 1993. “Functions: Consensus without Unity.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 74, no. 3: 196–208. Gould, Stephen. 1977. Ever Since Darwin. New York; London: Norton. Griffiths, Paul. 1993. “Functional Analysis and Proper Functions.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44, no. 3: 409–422. ———. 1999. “Squaring the Circle: Natural Kinds with Historical Essences.” In Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Robert A. Wilson, 209–228. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harris, Marvin. 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York: Crowell. 16 Rebekka Hufendiek et al. Haslanger, Sally. 2018. “What Is a Social Practice?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 82: 231–247. Henrich, Natalie, and Joseph Patrick Henrich. 2007. Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation. Evolution and Cognition. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Huneman, Philippe, ed. 2013. Functions: Selection and Mechanisms. New York: Springer. Khalidi, Muhammad Ali. 2013. Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kincaid, Harold. 2007. “Functional Explanation and Evolutionary Social Science.” In Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, 213–247. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Knapp, Peter. 1982. “The Question of Hegelian Influence upon Durkheim’s Sociology.” In The Sociological Galaxy, edited by C. Babbitt, 78–89. Philadelphia, PA: Sociological Society. ———. 1985. “The Question of Hegelian Influence upon Durkheim’s Sociology.” Sociological Inquiry 55, no. 1: 1–15. ———. 1986. “Hegel’s Universal in Marx, Durkheim and Weber: The Role of Hegelian Ideas in the Origin of Sociology.” Sociological Forum 1, no. 4: 586–609. Lopreato, Joseph. 1990. “From Social Evolutionism to Biocultural Evolutionism.” Sociological Forum 5, no. 2: 187–212. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. MacLay, George R. 1990. The Social Organism: A Short History of the Idea that a Human Society may be regarded as a Gigantic Living Creature. Great Barrington, MA: North River Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1944. A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other E ssays. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Marx, Karl. (1858/1903) 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Classics. Mayr, Ernst. 1961. “Cause and Effect in Biology.” Science 134, no. 3489: 1501–1506. McLaughlin, Peter. 2000. What Functions Explain: Functional Explanation and Self-Reproducing Systems. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Meaney, Mark E. 2002. Capital as Organic Unity: The Role of Hegel’s Science of Logic in Marx’s Grundrisse. Dodrecht, Boston, London: Kluver Academic Publishers. Millikan, Ruth. 1984. Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories. New Foundations for Realism, vol. 14. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1989. “In Defense of Proper Functions.” Philosophy of Science 56, no. 2 (June): 288–302. ———. 1999. “Historical Kinds and the ‘Special Sciences.’” Philosophical Studies 95, no. 1–2: 45–65. ———. 2000. On Clear and Confused Ideas: An Essay About Substance Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. Language: A Biological Model. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Introduction 17 Mossio, M., C. Saborido, and A. Moreno. 2009. “An Organizational Account of Biological Functions.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60, no. 4: 813–841. Mossio, Matteo, and Leonardo Bich. 2017. “What Makes Biological Organisation Teleological?” Synthese 194, no. 4: 1089–1114. Neander, Karen. 1991a. “The Teleological Notion of ‘Function.’” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69, no. 4: 454–468. ———. 1991b. “Functions as Selected Effects: The Conceptual Analyst’s Defense.” Philosophy of Science 58, no. 2: 168–184. ———. 2017. “Functional Analysis and the Species Design.” Synthese 194, no. 4: 1147–1168. Nussbaum, Martha. 1992. “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism.” Political Theory 20, no. 2: 202–246. van Parijs, Philippe. 1981. Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences: An Emerging Paradigm. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pettit, Philip. 1996. “Functional Explanation and Virtual Selection.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47, no. 2: 291–302. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Sanderson, Stephen K. 2016. Evolutionism and Its Critics: Deconstructing and Reconstructing an Evolutionary Interpretation of Human Society. New York: Routledge. Searle, John. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press. ———. 2010. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spencer, Herbert. 1893. The Principles of Sociology, vol. 1. London; Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate. Thomson, Judith. 2008. Normativity. Chicago, IL: Open Court. Tilly, Charles. 1998. Durable Inequality. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Turner, Stephen. 1986. The Search for a Methodology of Social Science: Durkheim, Weber, and the Nineteenth Century Problem of Cause, Probability, and Action. London, New York: Springer. Turner, Jonathan, and Alexandra Maryanski. 1979. Functionalism. San Francisco: Bejamin-Cummings Publishing Company. van Riel, Raphael. 2014. The Concept of Reduction. Heidelberg: Springer. Witt, Charlotte. 2011. The Metaphysics of Gender. Studies in Feminist Philosophy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, Larry. 1973. “Functions.” Philosophical Review 82, no. 2: 139–168.