Dear all, The CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar continues tomorrow, Wednesday 13th January, 1-2:30pm in HPS Seminar Room 2. Adrian Boutel (HPS) will give a talk entitled "Winchgenstein and functional explanation". The abstract is below.
All are very welcome, and we hope to see many of you there. Best wishes, Vashka -- Functional explanations in social science explain social phenomena by appeal to the role that they play in society's functioning. Such explanations look to be incompatible with those that appeal to social actors' subjective reasons for acting as they do-and to imply that such reasons must be mere rationalisation or epiphenomenal ideology. I argue that this is a false dilemma: the same behaviour can have both functional and intentional explanations. I then consider Peter Winch's influential application of Wittgensteinian ideas (hence: "Winchgenstein") to rule out functional explanation as inconsistent with social science's philosophically mandatory focus on interpreting meanings. I argue that functional explanation can survive Winch, perhaps with an assist from a different kind of functionalism. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
