Philosophy of Psychology as Philosophy of Science

Abstract

The spirit of the papers that follow, reflecting the title of the original symposium, is to treat the philosophy of psychology as a branch of the philosophy of science. As such, philosophy of psychology is to be conceived on a parallel with philosophy of physics and philosophy of biology, as an instance of the “philosophy of the special sciences.” The philosophy of the special sciences treats each of the sciences as potentially having its own explanatory structures, conceptual problems, and evidentiary relations, which may be more or less similar to those once discussed under “general philosophy of science,” with its typical reliance on examples from physics. In this connection, work in the philosophy of psychology over the past two decades has analyzed the structure of psychological explanations (Cummins 1983; Hardcastle 1992; Haugeland 1978), has examined the conceptual issues attending such notions as that of representation (Dretske 1981; Hatfield 1988b; Lloyd 1989; Shapiro 1993) or qualitative experiential content (Dennett 1991; Hardin 1988), and has examined the theoretical structure and explanatory possibilities of the new connectionism (Horgan and Tienson 1991; Ramsey et al. 1991).