Functatus Excessivus...

"Once upon a very long time ago, during the reign of Ronald von Recht, when Philosophy was queen of the Sciences (her kingdom was small and impoverished), there taught at the Majestic Institute of Tutelage an assistant professor of philosophy named Functatus Excessivus. Functatus marvelled at all the wonderful things to drink: clear-liquids-in-green-glasses, clear-liquids-in-blue-glasses, clear liquids-in-red-glasses and many others besides. But being a scholar of no mean scope, he was also taken by the abundance of games he found to play - guessing games, athletic contests and, most exciting of all, tenure roulette. Functatus dedicated himself to studying these two kinds of wonders. Beginning with the liquids, he devoted several years to sampling as many clear-liquids-in-glasses as his NSF grant allowed, first hoping to detect, but then finally despairing of finding, what made them all so nourishing. They seemed to have nothing in common, each obviously being of a different natural kind: red-glass, green-glass, blue glass. One day, even as his colleagues whispered in the halls about Functatus' bleak tenure prospects, he sampled a liquid-in-a-large bourbon-glass and thereupon was visited by the mysterious muse, Lisperata, who revealed to him that he had been searching for a phantom in his quest for the hidden essence common to clear-liquids in-glasses. Rather, Lisperata said, he should proclaim that despite their obvious physical differences, each clear-liquid-in-a-glass served much the same function. Each could slake one's thirst, revive wilted daisies and so on. Functatus gratefully concluded that a clear-liquid-in-a-glass was whatever had just such a network of relations. "Never mind the stuff! Look for the function!" How happy Functatus was. Even if he were to lose at tenure roulette, at least he had a slogan."

J. Christopher Maloney's very creative argument against functionalism.