{"id":239923,"date":"2026-06-29T14:22:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T19:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/functionalism-stanford-encyclopedia-of-philosophy-winter-2016-edition"},"modified":"2026-06-29T14:22:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T19:22:07","slug":"functionalism-stanford-encyclopedia-of-philosophy-winter-2016-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/functionalism-stanford-encyclopedia-of-philosophy-winter-2016-edition","title":{"rendered":"Functionalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy\/Winter 2016 Edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/functionalism-stanford-encyclopedia-of-philosophy-winter-2016-edition2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle\u2019s conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes\u2019s conception of the mind as a \u201ccalculating machine\u201d, but it has become fully articulated (and popularly endorsed) only in the last third of the 20th century. Though the term \u2018functionalism\u2019 is used to designate a variety of positions in a variety of other disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics, and architecture, this entry focuses exclusively on functionalism as a philosophical thesis about the nature of mental states.<\/p>\n<p>The following sections will trace the intellectual antecedents of contemporary functionalism, sketch the different types of functionalist theories, and discuss the most serious objections to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle\u2019s conception [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}