From social scientific functionalism to open functional logic

✍ Scribed by Uwe Becker

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1988
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 868 KB
• Volume: 17
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0304-2421
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00161730

✦ Synopsis

The times when social scientific writing was largely dominated by some pattern of functional reasoning are over. Its most prominent representative, Parsonsian sociology, came under attack in the sixties and early seventies 1 and subsequently lost its overwhelming influence. A few years later the so-called "crisis of Marxism" eroded the Marxist functionalist approach, most notably expounded by the Althusserian school. And in the sphere of methodology, Anthony Giddens observed in 1977 that with regard to functionalism "the battlefield is largely empty "'2 Nowadays methodological individualism, game theory, or, as in Marxism, discourse theory seem to have filled the place once held by functionalist system theory and "structuralist" Marxism. Even systems theorist Niklas Luhmann asserts in his recent work that functional explanation is nothing more than the "inquiry" into and "elimination" of functional equivalents? One of the few dissonants in this picture is provided by G. A. Cohen's