Appendix. Snafu and synecdoche: historical continuities in functional analysis

Summary

This appendix, essentially an elaboration of Chapter 1, is designed to defend the null hypothesis as it is applied, or should be applied, to the relationship between functionalism and the assorted mistakes, mis judgments, prejudices, distortions, and ideologies of its practitioners. In recent years it has been taken as axiomatic that, as one of our current graduate students affirms on his office door, “social science is inevitably moral science.” Claims of this kind may turn out to be true, but the problem is that when we treat them as axiomatic we are not strongly inclined to test them. And in the case of functionalism there is usually the additional implication that not only do our biases enter into the theory, but it is the theory itself that creates the biases. The null hypothesis, as usual, states that there is no relationship between functional analysis (or any other form of theory) and the various errors committed by its practitioners. As good scientists, we must adhere to the null hypothesis until we are compelled by strong evidence to abandon it. In my opinion, such evidence does not exist in the history of functional theory.

Although most authors who make reference to Davis's presidential speech emphasize his claim that functional analysis is just another name for general sociology, we saw in Chapter 1 that his argument was more elaborate and far-reaching than the usual summaries imply.