PHL * K101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Social Fact, Antipositivism, Reductionism
Document Summary
Besides naturalism and interpretativism, there is another strategy- functionalism. Functionalism cannot be easily assimilated to either interpretativism or causal naturalism. In this way, it is an alternative strategy- implications of a functionalist strategy. When looking at interpretivism- we were looking to give accounts of actions rather than descriptions- natural correlate with individualist action. Some aspects of social reality- social facts - there are aspects of reality that cannot be reduced to facts about the individuals that comprise that social group. A social fact is a fact about some collection of individuals that cannot be reduced to facts about the individuals. Lots of individual things that constitute an aggregate. In this case, there is nothing that can be said about the whole group of things that would be independent of what would be said about the individual objects. What is true of that clock cannot be determined by saying what is true about the parts.
