Mind and Cognition: Ch. 6 and 8 Flashcards
levels of explanation
building blocks of other entities
instrumentalism
best to reject or take as a useful fiction; a type of anti-realism that holds that scientific theories should be judged by their utility and not their truth value, or that scientific theories are not attempts to describe reality beyond experience.
anti-realism
judge by utility, not by true value; the thesis that what science dictates is not true. It is at worst a posit in need of wholesale rejection (eliminativism) and at best a useful fiction (instrumentalism).
theoretical constructs
hypothetical capacities and mechanisms that are postulated to explain the occurrence of observed behaviours
epistemology
the study of knowledge
ontological
a branch of metaphysics that focuses on the nature, structure, and categories of being and existence.
deduction
general law–> instances
induction
instances–> general law
scientific explanations
Why?; an account of why something is the case (rather than a mere description of the fact that it is).
pragmatic explanations
current goal of “understanding”; a view of explanation that claims that explanations are acts of communication; successful explanations result in others’ understanding.
overdetermination
multiple evidence–> same interpretation
underdetermination
insufficient evidence for any interpretation
scientific realism
“on the way” to describe reality, (sometimes) successful in doing so; the thesis that what science dictates (e.g., theory, entity, or relations) is approximately true.
reductionism
no to abstract, yes to basic and technical; the view that higher level entities, theories, or explanations (such as mental processes) are more fully or accurately described by appeal to the most basic science (i.e., physics).
logical positivism
factual content only
theory
a system of ideas that purports to explain a phenomenon
levels
entities or processes that make up (or are made up of) other entities, such as psychological and biological properties; levels can be thought of as ontologically real (“levels of nature”) or merely useful (“levels of description” or “levels of explanation”).
causal explanation
scientific explanations that advert to prior causes, usually by appeal to manipulations, mechanisms, models, or, more rarely, constant conjunctions and counterfactuals
Fallibilism
the doctrine that all knowledge claims could, in principle, be mistaken (weak) or are probably false (strong).
operationalization
specification of observable or measurable effects to be produced under the assumption that a theoretical construct is real.
animal models
experimental systems that include animals, or their parts or tissues, whose physiology or behavior is manipulated and studied with the ultimate goal to learn something about human physiology or behavior by extrapolation.
analogical models
models that are made up of objects that share a number of similarities with other, more complex objects, which are themselves the targets of scientific inquiry. When such models are manipulated and additional characteristics of their objects are consequently identified, then the inference can be made that the target objects also possess the newly identified characteristics.
validity
in experimental science, the likelihood that knowledge claims adequately capture the studied phenomenon.
reliability
the ability of a method to produce identical results under identical conditions.
face validity
the ability of a model to superficially mimic its target.
predictive validity
the ability of an experimental intervention to reproduce expected results.
convergent validity
the ability of a test to produce results that are reproducible through alternative experimental interventions
test battery
a standardized group of tests that are typically performed within a single experiment in order to ensure the accuracy of measurements and
observations
integration
the ability of multiple scientific disciplines to produce knowledge claims that together provide a better understanding of a studied phenomenon than any discipline by itself.
