Critical naturalism and the philosophy of psychology

Abstract

This essay addresses two issues: What are the basic conceptual differences between cognitivist and behaviorist approaches to scientific psychology? What is the significance of these differences for assessments of the relative merits of behaviorist and cognitivist research programs and the conceptions of human epistemic capacities and activities that these research programs suggest? Distinctions between mentalistic, mechanistic, and selectionistic forms of explanation are proposed. It is argued that classical cognitivism accepts and various forms of behaviorism reject mentalistic explanation, that mentalistic explanation is teleological, and that mechanistic and selectionistic explanations are efficient causal and not teleological. As a consequence, the classical cognitivist endorsement of mentalism can be associated with the scientific failures of teleological modes of thought such as animism and vitalism, and behaviorist endorsement of mechanistic and selectionistic explanation can be associated with the scientific successes of the modern natural scientific search for efficient causes. The implications of these arguments for naturalistic, pluralistic, but non-relativistic conceptions of epistemological assessment and epistemic progress are discussed.