ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that pragmatic genealogies are best interpreted as dynamic models whose point is to reveal the function – and noncoincidentally often the social function – of certain practices. What are the characteristics of pragmatic genealogies? It quickly becomes apparent that they have little in common with the genealogies approximating regular historiography that one finds predominantly outside philosophy. The key to understanding how pragmatic genealogies work is to distinguish what they minimally and primarily do from what they can then be used to do on that basis. In the first instance, pragmatic genealogies serve to reveal instrumental relations between certain needs and certain conceptual practices within a fictional model. Functionality ascription, then, is the primary business of pragmatic genealogy; but once a pragmatic genealogy has suggested and buttressed a functionality ascription, this ascription can be used as an explanatory basis for functional explanations of varying ambition.
