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 ...

The study analyses of the “degree of association” between the satisfaction expressed by the parental figures and the family structure they belong to: Family nuclear, single-parent, binuclear and complex families. In the transversal investigation, 631 mothers and fathers from the middle and upper-middle socio-cultural class took part. The identification of the family structures was undertaken by...

This paper reports a case of the successful application of sociologic theories in the area of Distributed Artificial Intelligence. We argue in favour of a rather deep conceptual transfer of sociologic models: it is shown how analytical theories from the school of structural functionalism, aimed at explaining observed phenomena in human societies, can be put “upside down”, so as to come up with ...

One characterization of functionalism that is probably vague enough to be acceptable to most functionalists is: each type of mental state is a state consisting of a disposition to act in certain ways and to have certain mental states, given certain sensory inputs and certain mental states. ... Functionalists want to individuate mental states causally, and since mental states have mental causes ...

The discussion of collective agency involves the reduction problem concept a collective. Individualism and Cartesian internalism have long restricted orthodox theories made them face tension between an irreducible ontological reductionism. Heterodox as functionalism interpretationism reinterpret accept it realized on level In order to adequately explain social phenomena that relations their ess...

Martine Nida-Rümelin (1996) argues that color science indicates that behaviorally undetectable spectrum inversion is possible and raises this possibility as an objection to functionalist accounts of visual states of color. I show that her argument does not rest solely on color science, but also on a philosophically controversial assumption, namely, that visual states of color supervene on physi...

The properties of Turing’s famous `universal machine’ has long sustained functionalist intuitions about the nature of cognition. This paper shows that there is a logical problem with standard functionalist arguments for multiple realizability. These arguments rely essentially on Turing’s powerful insights regarding computation. In addressing a possible reply to this criticism, it is further arg...

One of the key implications of functionalism is that minds can, in principle, be implemented with any physical substratum provided that the right functional relations are preserved. In this paper we present an architecture that implements neural epigenesis, reinforcement learning, and mental rehearsal, some of the functional building blocks that may enable us to build an artificial brain. Howev...

The article presents a historical and ontological analysis of modern Russian deviantology as socially significant interdisciplinary field knowledge. scientific context is described. categorical apparatus justified. author reveals the attributive signs deviance deviant behavior in paradigm integrative-convergent model interaction between individual environment. thesis about formation identity th...