Funktionalismus

Closely combined with theories of social, artificial or biological systems, functionalism is of central importance for many scientific disciplines in describing and explaining their special research topics. Although the term »function« is given different meanings, there is general agreement that functions are mechanisms for solving system problems. Despite the massive criticism social functionalism arouses - falsely founded on the principal of nomological causality of classical physics - functional explanations are indispensable for understanding the social world. According to Edwin Czerwick, the challenge is to create a framework of social functionalism as an empirical research program which, beside other things, is characterized by a combination of functional explanations with other causal, teleological, intentional and dispositional explanations.