Models and mechanisms in psychological explanation.

Mechanistic explanation has an impressive track record of advancing our understanding of complex, hierarchically organized physical systems, particularly biological and neural systems. But not every complex system can be understood mechanistically. Psychological capacities are often understood by pr...

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Publicado en:Synthese Vol. 183; no. 3; pp. 313 - 339
Autor principal: Weiskopf, Daniel
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Dec2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        10.1007/s11229-011-9958-9
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        au: Weiskopf, Daniel
        affil: Department of Philosophy, Georgia State University, Atlanta USA
      su:
        Cognitive psychology research
        Computational neuroscience
        Mechanism (Philosophy)
        Functional analysis
        Componential analysis (Linguistics)
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        subj:
          Cognitive psychology research
          Computational neuroscience
          Mechanism (Philosophy)
          Functional analysis
          Componential analysis (Linguistics)
      keyword:
        Cognition
        Mechanisms
        Models
        Psychological explanation
        Realization
      ab: Mechanistic explanation has an impressive track record of advancing our understanding of complex, hierarchically organized physical systems, particularly biological and neural systems. But not every complex system can be understood mechanistically. Psychological capacities are often understood by providing cognitive models of the systems that underlie them. I argue that these models, while superficially similar to mechanistic models, in fact have a substantially more complex relation to the real underlying system. They are typically constructed using a range of techniques for abstracting the functional properties of the system, which may not coincide with its mechanistic organization. I describe these techniques and show that despite being non-mechanistic, these cognitive models can satisfy the normative constraints on good explanations.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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