Cohen was a member of the school of Analytical Marxism, which seeks to explain and defend the views of Marx in a contemporary framework that uses the tools of deductive logic and linear reasoning, rather than polemics and rhetoric. Analytic Marxists are convinced of (a) the fundamental truth of Marxist's explanation of various social phenomena and (b) the possibility of lucidly explaining and indicating the benefits and efficacy of this line of explanation. This paper is an excellent specimen of this school. The aim is to object to Elster's attempts to update Marxism, which he does by making use of game theory and discarding functional explanations altogether.
For Cohen, on the other hand, functional explanations are ineliminable from historical materialism. A functional explanation is an explanation such that the function of a phenomenon explains its presence.
In biological research, Darwinian evolution provides a backdrop to the possibility of explaining the presence of some natural characteristic of an organism by referring to the fact that its beneficial results ensure (and have hitherto ensured) its selection. In sociology, however, these explanations are rather more tricky as there is less possibility of recourse to an "Invisible Hand" concept that might satisfy the terms of the explanation. The example presented is that of the formal relation between the legal code and the relations of production; on Marxist analysis, the former represents an aspect of the "superstructure" and the latter represents an aspect of the "base". Those who defend a dialectical materialist conception of history maintain that the base, that is, the economic conditions of the society under analysis such as the relationship between the machinery of production, the owners of said machinery, the labour force and the social systems of management that moderate these relations, determines the superstructure, which is, broadly speaking, the religion, ideology and social relationships that result from it.
When confronted with the following two complementary pairs of propositions:
1) The level of productive development (i.e. the existence of iron, computers or robotised assembly lines) explains the nature of its economic structure (i.e. autocratic, democratic, theocratic)
2) The economic structure explains the nature of its superstructure (the legal system, media controls, acceptability of certain sexual orientations, existence or non-existence of racism, sexism, bigotry etc.)
3) The economic structure assists and ensures the development of productive forces
4) the superstructure stablises its economic structure
Cohen claims he is obliged to offer functional explanations for 1 and 2 as this is the only way for him to avoid the conclusion that the pairs of propositions contradict eachother.
Cohen doesn't believe that there has yet been a good explanation of the mechanism whereby these phenomena inter-relate and co-determine, but that the functional reliance is open to observation (he compares this with the pre-Darwinist Lamarckian explanation of biological functions). There doesn't seem to me to be a problem with the concession that a functional reliance exists between two propositions without there being a conclusive mechanistic explanation. The problem, I think, lies in Cohen's analysis of that in which he claims a functional explanation to actually consist: rejecting reverse-causal effects, he recourses to what he calls consequence laws: "the only remaining candidate, which I therefore elect, is: e occurred because it would cause f, or, less tersely but more properly, e occurred because the situation was such that an event of type E would cause an event of type F" (Cohen's emphasis. Capitalisation refers to type rather than token events).
It doesn't take much to see that this account is lacking. There is much literature on the subject, and I believe that the work of David Lewis is the sine qua non of causal explanation, but a positivistic bent tempts me to believe that the inclusion of the hypothetical mode in explanation is only acceptable as a reduction or abbreviation of some proposition which refers to actual states of affairs. Dispositional analyses are acceptable as long as they are constructed against a theoretical background such that one is able to complete the analysis by recourse to non-hypothetical facts:
1) This is the sort of thing that Steven would eat.
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2) This is the sort of thing that in fact matches Steven's actual tastes, preferences and desires under certain conditions and not others (if "conditions" is uncomfortably... conditional, read "situations" instead)
or,
1) This is a material that would dissolve salt.
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2) This material possesses such actual properties that its conjoining with salt in fact has and does consistently result in the dissolution of the salt.
Cohen must then provide an analysis of the actual properties and relations that obtain. His formulation of a consequence law between types of event E and F: [if (if E then F) then E] is incomplete unless reduced using actual relations. No doubt dispositional analyses are useful in everyday life, but that does not detract from the requirement that they be reduced for an ontologically secure explanation. Ontological security is an absolute requirement for a rigorous, intellectually unproblematic scientific explanation, and if the entities and relations are to hold as Cohen claims they do then this reduction is indispensable. This, I would assume, would only be possible with the arrival of a mechanistic explanation but, as Cohen says, no such explanation is forthcoming, and as such this analysis cannot be anything more than provisional.
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