Functional Explanation and Virtual Selection
Citation: Pettit, P. (1996) Functional Explanation and Virtual Selection. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47(2): 291-302 (RSS)
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Summary
Pettit discussed the common problem and importance of functional explanation in social science. The functional explanation in social science aims to explain why certain social traits can be found in particular society. However, functional explanation cannot explain the mechanism of the function, which is called missing-mechanism in this paper. Another question is that whether we can adopt natural selection in social science.
Pettit argues that we should focus on the resilience of a phenomenon rather than the emergence or presence in social science. We can explain the resilience of a trait or institution serves an important function. For example, rituals in a society are resilient by serving social communication or solidarity. Anyone who gives up the ritual practice would suffer some difficulties and would go back to the ritual again. Sometimes the resilience is independent of the explanation. Pettit thinks that the idea of resilience relates to two explanations: one is equilibrium explanation, which suggests a pattern is inevitable in a certain context. Another one is the explanation of the fitness of a certain generic change. A gene has a higher degree of fitness means it has higher probability to survive.
By using the concept of resilience, Pettit argues that we do not have to explain the mechanism. What we need to focus on is the virtual selectionism, which means a story of selection will occur under any circumstance. Based on virtual selection, there are two kinds of explanation, functional explanation and rational choice explanation. Pettit then proposed two stages to conduct the functional explanation. First is to identify the function with resilience. Second, conduct an empirical investigation of features that fulfill these functions in our society.
