Sociology 915 Interrogations #9 Functional Explanation

Arthur Stinchcombe asserts, “There are a wide variety of social, psychological, and biological processes which can serve as a reverse causal link between homeostatic variables and functional structures. Hence there is nothing more philosophically confusing, nor anything any less empirical or scientific, about functional explanations than about other causal explanations. Functional explanations are merely a special case of causal theory, whose particular structure creates some interesting special results. But these are empirical results which can be tested against the facts” (90-91). It seems to be this last point that Elster misses in his critique of functionalism.