Levels Of Explanation In Psychology Research Articles

Is Executive Function the Universal Acid?

This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains (MIT Press, 2018), which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to our understanding of it. Then it addresses moral and legal responsibility generally, and specific doctrines. Executive function is seldom found to be the most perspicuous approach to any of the general or specific moral and legal questions.

Is Executive Function The Universal Acid?

This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains (MIT Press, 2018), which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to our understanding of it. Then it addresses moral and legal responsibility generally, and specific doctrines. Executive function is seldom found to be the most perspicuous approach to any of the general or specific moral and legal questions.

Mindless accuracy: on the ubiquity of content in nature

It is widely held in contemporary philosophy of mind that states with underived representational content are ipso facto psychological states. This view—the Content View—underlies a number of interesting philosophical projects, such as the attempt to pick out a psychological level of explanation, to demarcate genuinely psychological from non-psychological states, and to limn the class of states with phenomenal character. The most detailed and influential theories of underived representation in philosophy are the tracking theories developed by Fodor, Dretske, Millikan and others. Tracking theorists initially hoped to ‘naturalize’ underived representation by showing that although it is distinctively psychological it is not irreducibly so, yet they ended up developing theories of representation that by their own lights don’t pick out a distinctively psychological phenomenon at all. Burge (Origins of objectivity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010) sets out to develop a theory of underived representation that does pick out a distinctively psychological phenomenon. His theory promises to vindicate the Content View and the various philosophical projects that depend on it. In this paper I argue that Burge’s theory dementalizes representation for the same reason tracking theories do: These theories hold that representations are states with underived accuracy conditions, yet such states are found in all sorts of mindless systems, like plants.

On the autonomy of the concept of disease in psychiatry

Does the reference to a mental realm in using the notion of mental disorder lead to a dilemma that consists in either implying a Cartesian account of the mind-body relation or in the need to give up a notion of mental disorder in its own right? Many psychiatrists seem to believe that denying substance dualism requires a purely neurophysiological stance for explaining mental disorder. However, this conviction is based on a limited awareness of the philosophical debate on the mind-body problem. This article discusses the reasonableness of the concept of mental disorder in relation to reductionist and eliminativist strategies in the philosophy of mind. It is concluded that we need a psychological level of explanation that cannot be reduced to neurophysiological findings in order to make sense of mental disorder.

Die Eigenständigkeit des Krankheitsbegriffs in der Psychiatrie

Abstract Does the reference to a mental realm in using the notion of mental disorder lead to a dilemma that consists in either implying a Cartesian account of the mind-body relation or in the need to give up a notion of mental disorder in its own right? Many psychiatrists seem to believe that denying substance dualism requires a purely neurophysiological stance for explaining mental disorder. However, this conviction is based on a limited awareness of the philosophical debate on the mind-body problem. This article discusses the reasonableness of the concept of mental disorder in relation to reductionist and eliminativist strategies in the philosophy of mind. It is concluded that we need a psychological level of explanation that cannot be reduced to neurophysiological findings in order to make sense of mental disorder.

Levels of explanation and the workings of science

I address two questions that underlie most of the articles in this special issue: 1) What do different levels of explanation in psychology reveal? And 2) how do the dynamics of science affect what can be learned? I suggest that understanding hypothesis testing and generation in the abstract can provide a useful framework for understanding how cognitive modelling and neuroscience may interact. I further suggest that the preference for simple explanations and the dynamics of hypothesis testing may play out in different ways within the two fields, and that their overlap may prove most useful in the realm of hypothesis generation.