Mechanisms and psychological explanation

Abstract

This chapter outlines the history of machine-based approaches to psychology. The work on mechanistic explanation that is having a large impact on the philosophy of science is described in the chapter. The research on motivation and reward exemplifies the common explanatory practice in psychology — decomposing a composite, hierarchically organized system into its component parts and operations and then constructing models that abet scientific understanding of the way they might be organized so as to comprise the mechanism's activity. Mechanistic approaches reconfigure a number of issues in the philosophy of psychology beyond that of explanation. Two issues are considered in this chapter: the question of reductionism and the question of scientific discoveries. The mechanistic explanation is partially reductionistic in the sense that it appeals to lower-level parts and their operations in explaining why a mechanism behaves as it does; but mechanistic explanation is not reductionistic in the sense of deriving higher-level theories from lower-level ones nor in the sense of supplanting the explanations of causal processes at higher levels, where the mechanism as a whole engages other entities in its environment.