Mind and Cognition: Ch. 6 and 8

Question 1

levels of explanation

Answer 1

building blocks of other entities

Question 2

instrumentalism

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

anti-realism

Answer 3

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).

Question 4

theoretical constructs

Answer 4

hypothetical capacities and mechanisms that are postulated to explain the occurrence of observed behaviours

Question 5

epistemology

Answer 5

the study of knowledge

Question 6

ontological

Answer 6

a branch of metaphysics that focuses on the nature, structure, and categories of being and existence.

Question 7

deduction

Answer 7

general law–> instances

Question 8

induction

Answer 8

instances–> general law

Question 9

scientific explanations

Answer 9

Why?; an account of why something is the case (rather than a mere description of the fact that it is).

Question 10

pragmatic explanations

Answer 10

current goal of “understanding”; a view of explanation that claims that explanations are acts of communication; successful explanations result in others’ understanding.

Question 11

overdetermination

Answer 11

multiple evidence–> same interpretation

Question 12

underdetermination

Answer 12

insufficient evidence for any interpretation

Question 13

scientific realism

Answer 13

“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.

Question 14

reductionism

Answer 14

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).

Question 15

logical positivism

Answer 15

factual content only

Question 16

theory

Answer 16

a system of ideas that purports to explain a phenomenon

Question 17

levels

Answer 17

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”).

Question 18

causal explanation

Answer 18

scientific explanations that advert to prior causes, usually by appeal to manipulations, mechanisms, models, or, more rarely, constant conjunctions and counterfactuals

Question 19

Fallibilism

Answer 19

the doctrine that all knowledge claims could, in principle, be mistaken (weak) or are probably false (strong).

Question 20

operationalization

Answer 20

specification of observable or measurable effects to be produced under the assumption that a theoretical construct is real.

Question 21

animal models

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

analogical models

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

validity

Answer 23

in experimental science, the likelihood that knowledge claims adequately capture the studied phenomenon.

Question 24

reliability

Answer 24

the ability of a method to produce identical results under identical conditions.

Question 25

face validity

Answer 25

the ability of a model to superficially mimic its target.

Question 26

predictive validity

Answer 26

the ability of an experimental intervention to reproduce expected results.

Question 27

convergent validity

Answer 27

the ability of a test to produce results that are reproducible through alternative experimental interventions

Question 28

test battery

Answer 28

a standardized group of tests that are typically performed within a single experiment in order to ensure the accuracy of measurements and
observations

Question 29

integration

Answer 29

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.