ABSTRACT
Functionalism as an explanatory strategy is fairly obvious and common, both in ordinary life and in biology. According to the methodological individualist, the commitment to functionalism represents everything that is wrong with holistic social science. For a considerable period in twentieth-century social science, the methodology of seeking functions for features of human affairs was called structural functionalism. Macrosocial science requires this sort of functional analysis just because it claims to be autonomous from psychology and the rest of science. The claim of autonomy is the claim that knowing about the behavior of individual people can't tell much of anything about the social facts, because psychological theory is no help in developing sociological theory. The predictive and ameliorative goals of the human sciences impose upon all of them research programs that assume that most of the significant features of human affairs are adaptations for some individuals and groups, and maladaptations for other groups.
