A demanding commitment to non-psychological explanations

Psychological Explanations

“Now” is privileged in most psychological theories, which portray their processes as proceeding from moment-to-moment. As in any science, this adherence to contiguous causation hinders an account of phenomena that involve remote events or temporally extended organization. In addition, our scientific discourse is framed by the everyday patterns we have learned in explaining our own actions and t...

non-corrective approach to pronunciation

the aim of this study has been to find answers for the following questions: 1. what is the effect of immediate correction on students pronunciation errors? 2. what would be the effect of teaching the more rgular patterns of english pronunciation? 3. is there any significant difference between the two methods of dealing with pronuciation errore, i. e., correction and the teaching of the regular ...

Brains, lies, and psychological explanations

Learning Causes: Psychological Explanations of Causal Explanation

I argue that psychologists interested in human causal judgment should understand and adopt a representation of causal mechanisms by directed graphs that encode conditional independence (screening off) relations. I illustrate the benefits of that representation, now widely used in computer science and increasingly in statistics, by (i) showing that a dispute in psychology between ‘mechanist’ and...

On the Alleged Inadequacy of Psychological Explanations

Philosophers and other researchers interested in race have often ignored the explanations of racism developed by psychologists (for some recent exceptions, see Glasgow 2009; Blum forthcoming). We have argued elsewhere that this disregard of psychology has impoverished the arguments and considerations philosophers have relied upon (Faucher and Machery 2009; Kelly et al. in press). However, not e...