Theory and Explanation Flashcards
What is explananda?
That which needs to be explained.
What is explanans?
That which contains the explanation.
What are laws in physics?
- Laws are considered to be explanations (i.e explanans).
- General laws, i.e. laws that apply always and everywhere.
- Laws that follow the deductive nomological model of explanation (DN), i.e. scientific explanation is subsumption under law, meaning that explanation is deduced from laws and these laws are derived from other more fundamental, natural laws.
What are laws in psychology?
- Psychology not subsumption under law.
- Laws in situ (i.e. psychology does not produce general laws of nature, but laws about specific type of systems).
- Explananda, i.e. laws are considered to be explained, laws are effects that are left unexplained.
- Primary explananda: Capacities.
- Secondary explananda: Effects.
- Discovery and confirmation of effects.
- Explanations given by effects are not explanations.
What is meant by a capacity?
- The primary explananda of psychology.
- Definition: A capacity is a complex dispositional.
- Capacities do not have to be discovered, but specified.
- Cognitive capacities: perception, attention, memory, knowledge, reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, language.
What are effects in psychology?
- The secondary explananda of psychology.
- Properties of how we exercise our capacities, e.g. the effect of belief bias when doing reasoning.
- Incidental to the exercise of a capacity of interest.
- Help constrain explanations.
What are examples of effects in psychology?
- The McGurk effect (auditory illusions, multimodal perception, ba/ga/da)
- Reasoning error (validity of syllogisms, belief bias)
- Visual illusions
- Recency, primacy effect (memory, recall a list of words)
- Pop-out effects (similarity, features)
- Priming effect (repetition priming, semantic priming)
What is the primary explananda in psychology?
Capacities are the primary explananda in psychology.
What is the secondary explananda of psychology?
Effects are the secondary explananda of psychology.
Specifying capacities is
- Marr’s computational-level theory: The computation problem: The specification of a capacity into three levels: computational level, algorithmic / representational level and implementational level.
- Non-trivial: Capacities are often non-trivial/ill-specified specifications and therefore a capacity is typically not specified as a law/effect.
E.g. the capacity of understanding Chinese. - Functional analysis: Analyzing a capacity into a number of more simple capacities.
Analogy to a line production: Production is broken down into simple tasks. The different units have the capacity to perform one or more tasks, and when the tasks are combined and organized in a specific way, you have the finished product.
What does it mean that psychology is rich in effects?
Psychology is overwhelmed with things to explain (explananda). At the same time, psychology is underwhelmed with things to explain them with (explanans).
What does it mean that psychology is poor in formal theory?
- Concepts are hard to measure.
- The variables are human beings.
- Lack of generalisability.
- Short history as a science (for a long time part of philosophy).
- Scientific status much discussed.
- Theory/explanation often “story-telling”, no formal training in methods or how to build theory in the curriculum of psychology.
What are the two main problems for psychological explanation?
- Leibniz’ Gap
2. The unification problem
What is the problem of Leibniz’ Gap?
- Also called ‘the realization problem’.
- The problem that thoughts cannot be observed or perceived solely by examining the brain properties and processes.
- Gap between the mind and body.
- To bridge the gap, you need to find a theory that can correlate brain phenomena with pscyhological phenomena.
What is the Unification Problem?
- Lack of unification.
- Functional analysis explains a particular capacity/effect, e.g. vision. However, it does not unify the capacity with other analyses from other research areas, e.g. language, emotion, reasoning.
- Explanations from one paradigm are not very translatable into explanations in other.
- Competing paradigms.
- Possible solution: Hierarchy of frameworks, or a complete new framework.