The family unit is constantly evolving

The argument

The argument concerns what kind of thing a sociological definition can be. No definition of a family can hold weight for eternity, because the object being defined is not a natural kind with fixed properties but a social arrangement whose form is set by the people living in it. The sociological definition of a family can only be accurate for as long as social attitudes remain fixed, which means it describes a settlement rather than a permanent fact about human life. From this it follows that a change in attitudes is a change in the thing itself. As social attitudes towards marriage, sex, property, and economics change, the sociological definition of a family must also change. The four areas named are the ones that determine what a household is and what it does. Marriage settles who is formally joined to whom; attitudes to sex determine which relationships are recognised and which children are counted as belonging; property governs what is held in common and how it passes on; and economics decides whether the household is a unit of production, of consumption, or of neither. A shift in any one of them alters the arrangement the word is being used to name. The historical comparison shows the mechanism at work. In pre-industrial society, most families were a traditional nuclear family with one woman and man bonded through marriage, and their offspring, and a definition built on that pattern described the situation accurately at the time. This social construct no longer applies to many post-industrial societies, which is not a failure of the earlier definition but the expected consequence of defining something that moves. Sociologists are forced to revisit their definitions, and the fact that they must keep doing so is what this position means in saying that family has different meanings at different times.

Context

Because a family is a social construct, any definition can only be accurate for that time period. As social attitudes change so too does the sociological definition of a family.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Social and political attitudes change, but the core function of a family has remained the same since primitive family units roamed the Pangea supercontinent. Therefore, defining a family by what it does, rather than what it is, is still useful. A functionalist approach to defining a family can, therefore, effectively define a family.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] A functional approach is not dependent on social attitudes.