{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title":"The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0631153187","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","uuid":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title":"The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism","normalized_title":"theviolenceofabstractiontheanalyticfoundationsofhistoricalmaterialism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0631153187","isbns":["0631153187"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":93,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Violence%20of%20Abstraction%20The%20Analytic%20Foundations%20of%20Historical%20Materialism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"120 / 121","pdf_page":66,"physical_index":66,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"9a57f19c5f9dd0776745c18ebac2d761684963c837d6341c4b74102f1dc1654e"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"On the contrary, what is being offered in Darwinian theory is an historical and relational – a material - explanation of what functionalism apparently explains, namely the evident adaptation of giraffes to life among the acacias. It was of course exactly for this reason that Marx hailed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species for dealing 'the death-blow to teleology in the natural sciences' whilst setting forth its rational meaning in an empirical way' (1861). Darwin, Marx is saying, provided a material explanation of (and thereby makes rational) what superficially appears to be a teleological process. Cohen can construe the dispositional fact' that environments with tall trees favour long-necked mammals as in itself explanatory only by shortcircuiting this complex, material account of how long necks were both initially acquired and subsequently generalized through the species.\n\nIII\n\nThis line of criticism of functional explanation is hardly new, but Cohen does not confront it. What I am saying, in effect, is that explanations in terms of Cohen's ‘dispositional properties’ can be entirely rewritten in straightforward causal terms without any loss in content, but with a considerable gain in accuracy. Cohen's ‘dispositional properties’ are contingent factors (like presence of acacias) which mav feature as relevant antecedents in a perfectly conventional causal explanation (as of the long-necked giraffes’ survival) if certain other equally contingent events (like mutation) occur, but they do not thereby explain why those other events occur in the first place. They merely appear to do so, as long as we remain in ignorance of the real causal mechanisms at work.\n\nSomewhat paradoxically, the possibility of thus rewriting functional explanations as orthodoxly causal explanations is a consequence of Cohen's own insistence on eliminating the functionality of explananda from his characterisation of ‘consequence-explanation'. I could not have argued this case for all varieties of functional explanation. For Cohen, dispositional facts explain in exactly the same way that causal antecedents do. But this is not the case, for instance, in avowedly teleological explanations in which ends are explanatory without being temporal antecedents. Such explanations self-evidently cannot be assimilated to orthodox (Humean) causal paradigms in the way Cohen attempts for his consequence-explanations'. Were the functionality of the explanandum-event a necessary feature of functional explanation, the latter indeed would be a distinctive form of explanation - if an obviously dubious one, except when applied to entities capable of acting to achieve goals, like people or gods – and the translation of functional into causal propositions would be impossible without loss of the specifically teleological element in their content. For Cohen, though, causes lie in antecedent dispositional facts, not the functionality of explananda as such, and it is these supposed dispositional facts I argue can be causally rewritten.\n\nNow, it will be recalled that Cohen carefully distinguishes explanation and elaboration. The possibility of translating functional into causal propositions, however, depends precisely upon knowledge of what Cohen sees as extraneous to explanation strictu sensu, namely the causative mechanisms he relegates to the category of ‘elaboration’ of explanations. In his Darwinian example, it is only knowledge of random genetic variation - which actually causes long-necked giraffes to emerge - which allows us to rewrite what appears to be an explanation in terms of the dispositional properties of an environment, as an explanation in terms of material causes operating within that environment. In the absence of knowledge of the real causal mechanism at work, it is indeed only the ‘dispositional fact' that acacias favour species with long necks - precisely Darwin's explanandum – which appears capable of explaining the presence of giraffes.\n\nIt is worth spelling it out that, contrary to Cohen, this knowledge of causative mechanisms is not something through which we merely 'elaborate' explanation, supplying the how' to buttress the ‘why' we already know. It tells us rather than the functional answer to the question why - despite its initial plausibility - is wrong. Giraffes do not, except perhaps in a shorthand pardonable in biologists but inexcusable in philosophers, have long necks because their environment is such that if they did they would thrive in it. They have long necks by the luck of the genetic draw, operating within given environmental conditions, certainly, but not in any way which is functionally explained by those conditions. Indeed, knowledge of mechanisms shows that there are in fact no consequence-laws involved; as argued above, it in no way follows from the presence of acacias that the adaptive mutation actually will occur. If Darwinian theory is correct, we cannot say, for this area, if e would cause f, e will occur. We can reach this last conclusion however - in defiance of manifest correlations of species and environments - only because we know the adaptive mechanism in fact to be random. The causal ‘elaboration', in short, actually vitiates the supposed functional ‘explanation'; it shows the ‘dispositional' features of the environment not to be the explanatory factor, appearances notwithstanding.\n\n120\n\nINTERLUDE: THE GIRAFFES AMONG THE ACACIAS\n\nINTERLUDE: THE GIRAFFES AMONG THE ACACIAS\n\n121","previous_page":65,"next_page":67}