The philosophy of science of Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) is dated from the perspective of the contemporary pragmatism prevailing in today's academic philosophy of science; see: philsci.com. But Merton is still ahead of his time relative to today's academic sociologists, who construe sociology as social psychology. Merton studied under Talcott Parsons at Harvard, and was chairman of the department of sociology at Columbia. In this Social Theory and Social Structure originally published in 1949 he departs from Parsons' psychologistic romanticism with his own rendering of the functionalist type of explanation for sociology: He says that "social function" refers to observable objective consequences and not to subjective dispositions such as aims, motives, or purposes, and that the consequences of interest are those for the larger structures in which the functions are contained. He says failure to distinguish between objective sociological consequence and subjective disposition inevitably leads to confusion, because the subjective disposition may but need not coincide with the objective consequence; the two may vary independently. That confusion remains today among sociologists attempting to make "structural-equation" models. His concept of functional analysis in turn occasioned his distinction between "manifest" and "latent" functions: Manifest functions have objective consequences contributing to the adjustment of the social system and are intended and recognized by the participants in the social system. Latent functions also have objective consequences for the social system but are not intended or recognized by the participants in the social system. Latent functions are thus beyond the reach of any psychologistic sociology. Sociologists unwilling to enroll in an undergraduate level "Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy of Science" would benefit from the pragmatism in this book. Or google my web site, philsci.
Thomas J. Hickey
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