An interventionist approach to psychological explanation

Michael Rescorla

pp. 1909-1940

in: Gualtiero Piccinini (ed), Neuroscience and its philosophy, Synthese 195 (5), 2018.

Abstract

Interventionism is a theory of causal explanation developed by Woodward and Hitchcock. I defend an interventionist perspective on the causal explanations offered within scientific psychology. The basic idea is that psychology causally explains mental and behavioral outcomes by specifying how those outcomes would have been different had an intervention altered various factors, including relevant psychological states. I elaborate this viewpoint with examples drawn from cognitive science practice, especially Bayesian perceptual psychology. I favorably compare my interventionist approach with well-known nomological and mechanistic theories of psychological explanation.