What do functionalists believe

Another problem with views like the ones sketched above, some argue Kim , , is that mental and physical causes would thereby overdetermine their effects, since each would be causally sufficient for their production. And, though some theorists argue that overdetermination is widespread and unproblematic see Loewer , and also Shaffer, , and Sider , for a more general discussion of overdetermination , others contend that there is a special relation between role and realizer that provides an intuitive explanation of how both can be causally efficacious without counting as overdetermining causes.

For example, Yablo , suggests that mental and physical properties stand in the relation of determinable and determinate just as red stands to scarlet , and argues that our conviction that a cause should be commensurate with its effects permits us to take the determinable, rather than the determinate, property to count as causally efficacious in psychological explanation.

Bennett suggests, alternatively, that the realizer properties metaphysically necessitate the role properties in a way that prevents them from satisfying the conditions for overdetermination.

Yet another suggestion Wilson, , , and Shoemaker, is that the causal powers of mental properties are included among or are proper subsets of the causal powers of the physical properties that realize them.

See also Macdonald and Macdonald , Witmer, , Yates, , and Strevens, , for related views. There has been substantial recent work on the causal exclusion problem, which, as noted earlier, arises for any non-reductive theory of mental states. See the entry on Mental Causation, as well as Bennett , and Funkhouser , for further discussion and extensive bibliographies. If pain is functionally defined either by an a priori or an empirical theory as the state of being in some lower-level state or other that, in certain circumstances causes wincing, then it seems that the generalization that pain causes wincing in those circumstances is at best uninformative, since the state in question would not be pain if it didn't.

And, on the Humean view of causation as a contingent relation, the causal claim would be false. Davidson b once responded to a similar argument by noting that even if a mental state M is defined in terms of its production of an action A, it can often be redescribed in other terms P such that 'P caused A' is not a logical truth. But it's unclear whether any such redescriptions are available to role vs.

Some theorists e. Antony and Levine have responded by suggesting that, though mental states may be defined in terms of some of their effects, they have other effects that do not follow from those definitions which can figure into causal generalizations that are contingent, informative, and true. For example, even if it follows from a functional definition that pain causes wincing and thus that the relation between pain and wincing cannot be truly causal , psychologists may discover, say, that pain produces resilience or submissive behavior in human beings.

Such claims could be affirmed, however, if as seems likely the most plausible functional theories define sensations such as pain in terms of a small subset of their distinctive psychological , rather than behavioral, effects see section 4. A different line of response to this worry Shoemaker d, is to deny the Humean account of causation altogether, and contend that causal relations are themselves metaphysically necessary, but this remains a minority view.

See also Bird, , and Latham, , for further discussion. We seem to have immediately available, non-inferential beliefs about these states, and the question is how this is to be explained if mental states are identical with functional properties. The answer depends on what one takes these introspective beliefs to involve. Broadly speaking, there are two dominant views of the matter but see Peacocke , Ch. A full discussion of these questions goes beyond the scope of this entry, but the articles cited above are just three among many helpful pieces in the Open Peer Commentary following Goldman , which provides a good introduction to the debate about this issue.

Another account of introspection, identified most closely with Shoemaker a,b,c,d , is that the immediacy of introspective belief follows from the fact that occurrent mental states and our introspective beliefs about them are functionally interdefined. For example, one satisfies the definition of being in pain only if one is in a state that tends to cause in creatures with the requisite concepts who are considering the question the belief that one is in pain, and one believes that one is in pain only if one is in a state that plays the belief role, and is caused directly by the pain itself.

On this account of introspection, the immediacy and non-inferential nature of introspective belief is not merely compatible with functionalism, but required by it. But there is an objection, most recently expressed by George Bealer ; see also Hill , that, on this model an introspective belief can only be defined in one of two unsatisfactory ways: either as a belief produced by a second-order functional state specified in part by its tendency to produce that very type of belief — which would be circular — or as a belief about the first-order realization of the functional state, rather than that state itself.

Functionalists have suggested, however Shoemaker , McCullagh , Tooley , that there is a way of understanding the conditions under which beliefs can be caused by, and thus be about, one's second-order functional states that permits mental states and introspective beliefs about them to be non-circularly defined but see Bealer , for a skeptical response.

A full treatment of this objection involves the more general question of whether second-order properties can have causal efficacy, and is thus beyond the scope of this discussion see section 5. Yet another objection to functionalist theories of any sort is that they do not capture the interrelations that we take to be definitive of beliefs, desires, and other intentional states.

Whereas even analytic functionalists hold that mental states— and also their contents— are implicitly defined in terms of their causal or probabilistic roles in producing behavior, these critics understand intentional states to be implicitly defined in terms of their roles in rationalizing , or making sense of , behavior.

This is a different enterprise, they claim, since rationalization, unlike causal explanation, requires showing how an individual's beliefs, desires, and behavior conform, or at least approximate, to certain a priori norms or ideals of theoretical and practical reasoning — prescriptions about which beliefs and desires we should have, how we should reason, or what, given our beliefs and desires, we ought to do. See Davidson c, Dennett , and McDowell for classic expressions of this view.

One can't, that is, extract facts from values. This is not to say, these theorists stress, that there are no causes, or empirical laws of, behavior. These, however, will be expressible only in the vocabularies of the neurosciences, or other lower-level sciences, and not as relations among beliefs, desires and behavior. Functionalists have replied to these worries in different ways. Many just deny the intuition behind the objection, and maintain that even the strictest conceptual analyses of our intentional terms and concepts purport to define them in terms of their bona-fide causal roles, and that any norms they reflect are explanatory rather than prescriptive.

They argue, that is, that if these generalizations are idealizations, they are the sort of idealizations that occur in any scientific theory: just as Boyle's Law depicts the relations between the temperature, pressure, and volume of a gas under certain ideal experimental conditions, our a priori theory of the mind consists of descriptions of what normal humans would do under physically specifiable ideal conditions, not prescriptions as to what they should , or are rationally required , to do.

Other functionalists agree that we may advert to various norms of inference and action in attributing beliefs and desires to others, but deny that there is any in principle incompatibility between normative and empirical explanations.

They argue that if there are causal relations among beliefs, desires, and behavior that even approximately mirror the norms of rationality, then the attributions of intentional states can be empirically confirmed Fodor ; Rey In addition, many who hold this view suggest that the principles of rationality that intentional states must meet are quite minimal, and comprise at most a weak set of constraints on the contours of our theory of mind, such as that people can't, in general, hold obviously contradictory beliefs, or act against their sincerely avowed strongest desires Loar See Stich , and Levin , for discussion of this question, and for a more general debate about the compatibility of normative and psychological principles, see Rey, , and Wedgwood, Nonetheless, although many functionalists argue that the considerations discussed above show that there is no in principle bar to a functionalist theory that has empirical force, these worries about the normativity of intentional ascription continue to fuel skepticism about functionalism and, for that matter, any scientific theory of the mind that uses intentional notions.

In addition to these general worries about functionalism, there are particular questions that arise for functional characterizations of experiential or phenomenal states. These questions will be discussed in the following section.

Functionalist theories of all varieties — whether analytic or empirical, FSIT or functional specification — attempt to characterize mental states exclusively in relational, specifically causal, terms. The next three sections will present the most serious worries about the ability of functionalist theories to give an adequate characterization of these states. See Searle , G. Conversely, some argue that functional role is not necessary for qualitative character: for example, it seems that one could have mild, but distinctive, twinges that have no typical causes or characteristic effects.

All these objections purport to have characterized a creature with the functional organization of normal human beings, but without any, or the right sort, of qualia or vice versa , and thus to have produced a counterexample to functional theories of experiential states. One line of response, initially advanced by Sydney Shoemaker b , is that although functional duplicates of ourselves with inverted qualia may be possible, duplicates with absent qualia are not, since their possibility leads to untenable skepticism about the qualitative character of one's own mental states.

This argument has been challenged, however Block b; but see Shoemaker's response in d, and Balog, , for a related view , and the more common response to these objections—particularly to the absent qualia objection— is to question whether scenarios involving creatures such as Blockheads provide genuine counterexamples to functionalist theories of experiential states.

For example, some theorists Dennett ; Levin ; Van Gulick argue that these scenarios provide clear-cut counterexamples only to crude functional theories, and that attention to the subtleties of more sophisticated characterizations will undermine the intuition that functional duplicates of ourselves with absent qualia are possible or, conversely, that there are qualitative states without distinctive functional roles.

The plausibility of this line of defense is often questioned, however, since there is tension between the goal of increasing the sophistication and thus the individuative powers of the functional definitions, and the goal for analytic functionalists of keeping these definitions within the bounds of the a priori though see Section 4.

A related suggestion is that absent qualia seem possible only because of our imaginative shortcomings, in particular, that it is hard for us to attend, at any one time, to all the relevant features of even the simplest functional characterization of experiential states; another is that the intuition that Blockheads lack qualia is based on prejudice—against creatures with unfamiliar shapes and extended reaction times Dennett , or creatures with parts widely distributed in space Lycan, , Schwitzgebel and commentary.

There are other responses to analogous absent qualia arguments that are prominent in the literature, but the target of those arguments is broader. Block's argument was initially presented as a challenge exclusively to functionalist theories, both analytic and empirical, and not generally to physicalistic theories of experiential states; the main concern was that the purely relational resources of functional description were incapable of capturing the intrinsic qualitative character of states such as feeling pain, or seeing red.

Indeed, in Block's b, p. But there are similar objections that have been raised against all physicalistic theories of experiential states that are important to consider in evaluating the prospects for functionalism. These will be discussed in the next two sections. One important objection, advanced by among others Kripke and Chalmers a , derives from Descartes's well-known argument in the Sixth Meditation that since he can clearly and distinctly conceive of himself existing apart from his body and vice versa , and since the ability to clearly and distinctly conceive of things as existing apart guarantees that they are in fact distinct, he is in fact distinct from his body.

Thus, he concludes, zombies are possible, and functionalism — or, more broadly, physicalism — is false. The force of the Zombie Argument is due in large part to the way Chalmers defends its two premises; he provides a detailed account of just what is required for zombies to be conceivable, and also an argument as to why the conceivability of zombies entails their possibility see also Chalmers , , , Ch.

For alternative ways of explaining conceivability, see Kripke , Hart ; for criticism of the argument from two-dimensional semantics, see Yablo , , Bealer , Stalnaker , Soames , Byrne and Prior ; but see also Chalmers Such attempts thus pose, at very least, a unique epistemological problem for functionalist or physicalist reductions of qualitative states.

In response to these objections, analytic functionalists contend, as they did with the inverted and absent qualia objections, that sufficient attention to what is required for a creature to duplicate our functional organization would reveal that zombies are not really conceivable, and thus there is no threat to functionalism and no explanatory gap. A related suggestion is that, while zombies may now seem conceivable, we will eventually find them inconceivable, given the growth of empirical knowledge, just as we now find it inconceivable that there could be H2O without water Yablo Alternatively, some suggest that the inconceivability of zombies awaits the development of new concepts that can provide a link between our current phenomenal and physical concepts Nagel , , while others McGinn agree, but deny that humans are capable of forming such concepts.

None of these responses, however, would be an effective defense of Psychofunctionalism, which does not attempt to provide analyses of experiential concepts or suggest that there would, or could, be any to come.

But there is an increasingly popular strategy for defending physicalism against these objections that could be used to defend Psychofunctionalism, namely, to concede that there can be no conceptual analyses of qualitative concepts such as what it's like to see red or what it's like to feel pain in purely functional terms, and focus instead on developing arguments to show that the conceivability of zombies neither implies that such creatures are possible nor opens up an explanatory gap.

One line of argument Block and Stalnaker ; Yablo contends that the conceivability of alleged counterexamples to psycho-physical or psycho-functional identity statements, such as zombies, has analogues in other cases of successful inter-theoretical reduction, in which the lack of conceptual analyses of the terms to be reduced makes it conceivable, though not possible, that the identities are false.

However, the argument continues, if these cases routinely occur in what are generally regarded as successful reductions in the sciences, then it's reasonable to conclude that the conceivability of a situation does not entail its possibility.

A different line of argument Horgan ; Loar ; Lycan ; Hill , Hill and McLaughlin , Balog maintains that, while generally the conceivability of a scenario entails its possibility, scenarios involving zombies stand as important exceptions. Whereas conceptually independent third-personal concepts x and y may reasonably be taken to express metaphysically independent properties, or modes of presentation, no such metaphysical conclusions can be drawn when one of the concepts in question is third-personal and the other is phenomenal , since these concepts may merely be picking out the same properties in different ways.

Thus, the conceivability of zombies, dependent as it is on our use of phenomenal concepts, provides no evidence of their metaphysical possibility. Key to this line of defense is the claim that these special phenomenal concepts can denote functional or physical properties without expressing some irreducibly qualitative modes of presentation of them, for otherwise it couldn't be held that these concepts do in fact apply to our functional or physical duplicates, even though it's conceivable that they don't.

This, not surprisingly, has been disputed, and there is currently much discussion in the literature about the plausibility of this claim. See Chalmers , Holman, for criticism of this view, but see the responses of Loar , and Hill and McLaughlin , Balog, , Levin, , forthcoming, Diaz-Leon, , ; see also see Levin , , and Shroer, , for the presentation, if not endorsement, of a hybrid view.

Though neither Nagel nor Jackson now endorse this argument, many philosophers contend that it raises special problems for any physicalistic view see Alter , and, in response, Jackson Nemirow , , Lewis , Levin See Tye , for a summary of the pros and cons of this position; for further discussion, see the essays in Ludlow, Nagasawa, and Stoljar An alternative view among contemporary functionalists is that coming to know what it's like to see red or feel pain is indeed to acquire propositional knowledge uniquely afforded by experience, expressed in terms of first-personal concepts of those experiences.

This view, of course, shares the strengths and weaknesses of the analogous response to the conceivability arguments discussed above. If it is plausible, however, it can also challenge the argument of some philosophers e. There is one final strategy for defending a functionalist account of qualitative states against all of these objections, namely, eliminativism Dennett ; Rey , Frankish, One can, that is, deny that there are any such things as irreducible qualia , and maintain that the conviction that such things do, or perhaps even could , exist is due to illusion — or confusion.

In the last part of the 20th century, functionalism stood as the dominant theory of mental states. But, in contrast to behaviorism, functionalism's characterization of mental states in terms of their roles in the production of behavior grants them the causal efficacy that common sense takes them to have.

And in permitting mental states to be multiply realized, functionalism seems to offer an account of mental states that is compatible with materialism, without limiting the class of those with minds to creatures with brains like ours. More recently, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the psycho-physical type- identity thesis, fueled in part by the contention that, in the actual practice of neuroscience, neural states are type-individuated more coarsely than early identity theorists such as Place, Feigl, and Smart assumed.

If this is so, then it may well be that creatures that differ from us in their fine-grain neurophysiological make-up can nonetheless share our neural states, and thus that the psycho-physical identity thesis can claim some of the scope once thought to be exclusive to functionalism. The plausibility of this thesis depends, first, on whether or not such creatures would in fact be our functional equivalents, and if so, whether or not their underlying similarities would in fact be coarse-grain neural similarities, and not finer-grain psycho-functional similarities.

Even so, it seems that there could be creatures, both biological and non-biological, that are functionally equivalent to us but do not possess even our coarse-grain neural properties. If so, and if these creatures can plausibly be regarded as sharing our mental states—to be sure, a controversial thesis—then even if neural states can be individuated more coarsely, functionalism will retain its claim to greater universality than the identity thesis. There remain other substantial questions about functionalism.

Most discussions of the prospects for functionalism focus on its adequacy as an account of familiar experiential states such as sensational and perceptual experiences, and familiar intentional states such as beliefs and desires.

But although some philosophers have considered whether there can be adequate functionalist characterizations of emotions and moods e. Rey, , Nussbaum, , deHoog, et al, there is increasing interest in these questions, and more work needs to be done. In addition, there is increasing interest in determining whether there can be plausible functional characterizations of non-standard perceptual experiences, such as synaesthesia, and various sorts of altered states of consciousness that can arise from the ingestion of drugs or from focused meditation.

See Gray et al. For general discussions of altered states of consciousness, see Velmans and Schneider, eds. Yet another question is whether functional theories can accommodate non-standard views about the location of mental states, such as the hypothesis of extended cognition, which maintains that certain mental states such as memories—and not just their representational contents—can reside outside the head.

This question has implications not only for the viability of a functionalist characterization of memory, but also of beliefs, emotions, and moods. In general, the sophistication of functionalist theories has increased since their introduction, but so has the sophistication of the objections to functionalism, especially to functionalist accounts of mental causation section 5.

For those unconvinced of the plausibility of dualism, however, and unwilling to restrict mental states to creatures physically like ourselves, the initial attractions of functionalism remain.

The primary challenge for future functionalists, therefore, will be to meet these objections to the doctrine, either by articulating a functionalist theory in increasingly convincing detail, or by showing how the intuitions that fuel these objections can be explained away. What is Functionalism? Antecedents of Functionalism 2.

Varieties of Functionalism 3. Constructing Plausible Functional Theories 4. Objections to Functionalism 5. Antecedents of Functionalism Although functionalism attained its greatest prominence as a theory of mental states in the last third of the 20th century, it has antecedents in both modern and ancient philosophy, as well as in early theories of computation and artificial intelligence. Pain is the state that tends to be caused by bodily injury, to produce the belief that something is wrong with the body and the desire to be out of that state, to produce anxiety, and, in the absence of any stronger, conflicting desires, to cause wincing or moaning.

Constructing Plausible Functional Theories So far, the discussion of how to provide functional characterizations of individual mental states has been vague, and the examples avowedly simplistic.

Objections to Functionalism The previous sections were by and large devoted to the presentation of the different varieties of functionalism and the evaluation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. The Future of Functionalism In the last part of the 20th century, functionalism stood as the dominant theory of mental states. Bibliography Adams, F. Aizawa, Aizawa, K. Alter, T. Nagasawa, Walter, Antony, L. Levine, Armstrong, D. Baker, L. Balog, K. Bayne, T. Bealer, G.

Bechtel, W. Bennett, K. Bickle, J. Bird, A. Block, N. Tomberlin ed. Flanagan and G. Guzeldere eds. Fodor, Stalnaker, Braddon-Mitchell, D. Burge, T. Byrne, A. Prior, Chalmers, D. Garcia-Carpintiero, M. Macia eds. Chisholm, R. Perceiving , Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chomsky, N. Churchland, P. Clark, A. Crane, T. Davidson, D. De Joong, H. Shouten eds. Rethinking Reduction , Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Dennett, D.

Marcel and E. Bisiach eds. Deroy, O. Diaz-Leon, E. Ebert, P. Feigl, H. Field, H. Fodor, J. Frankish, K. Frege, G. In the past, empires such as those that existed in China, Europe, Africa, and Central and South America linked people from many different countries, but those people rarely became part of a common culture. They lived too far from each other, spoke different languages, practiced different religions, and traded few goods.

Today, increases in communication, travel, and trade have made the world a much smaller place. More and more people are able to communicate with each other instantly—wherever they are located—by telephone, video, and text. They share movies, television shows, music, games, and information over the Internet. Students can study with teachers and pupils from the other side of the globe. Governments find it harder to hide conditions inside their countries from the rest of the world.

Sociologists research many different aspects of this potential global culture. Some explore the dynamics involved in the social interactions of global online communities, such as when members feel a closer kinship to other group members than to people residing in their own countries. Other sociologists study the impact this growing international culture has on smaller, less-powerful local cultures. Yet other researchers explore how international markets and the outsourcing of labor impact social inequalities.

Show Answer. Show Glossary. Skip to main content. Module 1: Foundations of Sociology. Search for:. Reading: Structural-Functional Theory Sociological Paradigm 1: Functionalism Functionalism , also called structural-functional theory, sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of the individuals in that society. Learn how your comment data is processed. Skip to content An introduction to Functionalism for AS and A level sociology — covering the basic key ideas of Functionalist thinkers Durkheim and Parsons — social facts, social solidarity, and anomie, the organic analogy, and the importance of socialisation.

Society shapes the Individual Durkheim argued that society has a reality of its own over and above the individuals who comprise it. The Organic Analogy — we should see society as a system Talcott Parsons saw society as working like a human body, arguing that institutions in society were like organs in the body — each performing specific functions which were necessary to the maintenance of the whole.

Parsons identified various similarities between the human body and a society The body The Organic Analogy Institutions Each Organ has a unique function Institutions have a unique function All the bits essentially work together harmoniously All institutions work together harmoniously Organs are interdependent Organs are interdependent Has an identifiable boundary Has an identifiable boundary The sum is greater than its parts The sum is greater than its parts.

Normal: healthy Normal: low rates social problems. In advanced industrial society, these needs are met through specialized sub systems: Every society needs to Institutions in society which might perform these functions? Value Consensus Parsons believed that American society generally worked for most people, and thus preserving the social order preventing conflict or revolution was particularly important.

Do institutions really perform positive functions? Great comment! Leave a Reply Cancel reply. Previous Previous post: Sociological Perspectives on Identity. This website uses cookies to improve your experience.

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