Underreliance on Mechanistic Models: Comment on Ferguson (2015).

Ferguson (2015) proposed that our overreliance on mechanistic models is responsible for the public's negative view of psychology. On the contrary, I claim that our explanations do not actually explain because they lack mechanism information and that is why the public has a negative view of psycholog...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	American Psychologist Vol. 71; no. 6; pp. 505 - 507
Main Author:	Tryon, Warren W.
Format:	Article
Published:	American Psychological Association Sep2016
Subjects:	Psychology Pathological psychology Social skills Brain Mathematical models of psychology Neural pathways
Online Access:	View this record in EBSCOhost

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Summary:	Ferguson (2015) proposed that our overreliance on mechanistic models is responsible for the public's negative view of psychology. On the contrary, I claim that our explanations do not actually explain because they lack mechanism information and that is why the public has a negative view of psychology. Some of the mechanism information required to move from interpretations to explanations can be found in parallel distributed processing connectionist neural network models of psychology and behavior.