Meehl argued in 1978 that theories in psychology come and go, with little cumulative
progress. We believe that this assessment still holds, as also evidenced by increasingly …

The concept of mechanism has been an important organizing principle in science and
philosophy since at least the early modern period (Dijksterhuis 1950 [1961]; Boas 1952) …

3 wider range of scientific domains. We should emphasize that both of these classifications
are idealizations. Metaphysical and methodological questions are of course not that easy to …

Scientific reductionism, the view that higher level functions can be explained by properties at
some lower-level or levels, has been an assumption of nervous system analyses since the …

An adequate understanding of the ubiquitous practice of mechanistic explanation requires
an account of what Craver (J Philos Res, 32: 3–20, 2007b) termed “constitutive relevance.” …

Finding causes is a central goal in psychological research. In this paper, I argue based on
the interventionist approach to causal discovery that the search for psychological causes …

The first part of this article finds Craver's mutual manipulability theory (MM) of constitution
inadequate, as it definitionally ties constitution to the feasibility of ideal experiments, which …

In contemporary philosophy of science, the consensus view seems to be that scientific
explanations describe mechanisms responsible for the phenomena to be explained. Two …

Borsboom and colleagues have recently proposed a “network theory” of psychiatric
disorders that conceptualizes psychiatric disorders as relatively stable networks of causally …

The levels metaphor is ubiquitous in our descriptions of science and the world. So simple
and elegant, the metaphor takes an apparently heterogeneous collection of objects and …