By the same token, we should not suppose production relations and superstructures take the forms they do because they respectively serve’ productive forces and economic structures - even if they manifestly do - without a far more convincing defence of functional explanation than Cohen supplies. It may on the contrary be the case that, sav, a ‘superstructural' feature arising out of eminently noneconomic causes is quite contingently able to facilitate certain economic' developments, as the mutation does the survival of giraffes on the plains of Africa. In such cases the feature should properly belong, in the first instance, in the causal explanans of why a given economic structure is able to emerge, and not, by functional sleight of hand, be numbered among its explananda. Once the mode of production is on its feet, the environment it constitutes for the superstructural feature at issue might in turn help explain the latter's persistence, as the continued presence of acacias does the survival of long-necked giraffes. But if it did, it would do so materially, not functionally.
Examples of this might include, in the case of capitalism, Weber's Protestant ethic or the English common law. Few sociologists would deny the pertinence of either for capitalist development, but only a historical ignoramus would ascribe them capitalist origins. Many would accept that whatever their origins, the survival of both was considerably facilitated by the success of the capitalist economic structure they (arguably) helped give rise to. Christopher Hill argues this brilliantly for both Protestantism and the common law as summated in Coke's Institutes.4 The seductiveness - a fatal one - of Cohen's functionalist model is that (like much bad Marxism) it apparently allows us to have our cake and eat it. Technological and economic determinisms can be maintained in a dispositional’ form in which straightforward empirical challenges cannot be used to refute them. I would argue, however, that to hold, as Cohen must, that such superstructural’ factors as Protestantism and law are ‘selected for' by bases (or bases by productive forces) at best obscures explanation of their real material causes, while to excavate the latter – schisms in the Church, the strength of the Norman and Angevin monarchies, and suchlike eminently undispositional factors - is likely to reveal the alleged ‘selection' to be as contingent, and dispositional' explanation as spurious, as in Cohen's mistreatment of Darwin. To sever explanation' and ‘elaboration', in short, is to evade explanation, in any material sense, entirely. In the case of Marxism it is to substitute theory for history. Functional explanations can masquerade as explanatory only so long as material causes remain unexplicated.
This brings me to the major point I want to make here. What is most striking in Cohen's formulation of functional explanation, and has not generally been raised in debates around his book, is that he sees it as a variant of causal explanation – albeit of a distinctive kind – as the latter is understood within the mainstream positivist tradition. His use of Hempel's D-N schema is indicative. Within this tradition - which derives ultimately from Hume - a cause is understood in terms simply of constant conjunction (if p, then q) of terms between which no necessary connection obtains. To give a causal explanation of something is accordingly merely to show that it instantiates a covering law, the latter being a universal conditional relating empirical particulars. Cohen formulates the relation between his consequencelaws and consequence-statements in exactly the same way. His expunging of considerations of mechanism from explanation proper, and attempt to characterize the latter in terms of its logical form alone, is likewise wholly of a piece with the positivist project.
But Cohen ignores here the entire (and currently very influential) realist tradition in the philosophy of science, which has many adherents within or sympathetic to Marxism. Indeed there is now a large literature which seeks to annex Marx to the realist cause.5 Now for realism, expressibility in D-N form is certainly not sufficient, and for some realists like Bhaskar is not even always necessary, to qualify a series of propositions as an explanation. Another way of putting this is to say that what is entailed in giving an adequate explanation cannot be sufficiently described by giving an account of its logical form alone. The covering law model, accordingly, does not adequately characterize what scientists (or ordinary language) actually mean when they speak of a cause.
122
INTERLUDE: THE GIRAFFES AMONG THE ACACIAS
INTERLUDE: THE GIRAFFES AMONG THE ACACIAS
123