Extended Mechanistic Explanations: Expanding the Current Mechanistic Conception to Include More Complex Biological Systems

Mechanistic accounts of explanation have recently found popularity within philosophy of science. Presently, we introduce the idea of an extended mechanistic explanation, which makes explicit room for the role of environment in explanation. After delineating Craver and Bechtel’s (2007) account, we argue this suggestion is not sufficiently robust when we take seriously the mechanistic environment and modeling practices involved in studying contemporary complex biological systems. Our goal is to extend the already profitable mechanistic picture by pointing out the importance of the mechanistic environment. It is our belief that extended mechanistic explanations, or mechanisms that take into consideration the temporal sequencing of the interplay between the mechanism and the environment, allow for mechanistic explanations regarding a broader group of scientific phenomena.     

Moral Emotions,Awareness, and Spiritual Freedom in the Thought of Zhu Xi (1130–1200)

It is well known that the Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi (1130–1200) particularly emphasizes the role of emotions in human life. This paper shows that the four ‘moral emotions’ (e.g. feelings like ‘compassion’ and ‘disdain’ as described in the Mencius) are central to Zhu's thinking, insofar as only their genuine actualization enables the individual to achieve spiritual freedom. Moreover, I discuss the crucial notions of ‘awareness’/‘perception’ (zhījué) and ‘knowledge’/‘wisdom’ (zhī), in order to reveal the complex dynamic that moral emotions are said to create in the moral agent. I also analyse two important passages from the Mencius (1A/7 and 2A/6) and examine how Zhu Xi, in his exegetical glosses, defines the conditions of virtuous agency as based on the moral emotions. Finally, I explain the reasons why Neo-Confucians like Zhu Xi have sometimes been described as Kantian thinkers avant la lettre.     

Biological Explanations and Stigmatizing Attitudes: Using Essentialism and Perceived Dangerousness to Predict Antistigma Intervention Effectiveness

ABSTRACT

The theory of essentialism suggests that biological explanations of stigmatized behavior may not be effective at decreasing stigmatizing attitudes. The effects of biological explanations on stigmatizing attitudes were the topic of two experiments. In the first experiment, participants (N = 243) perceived a biological explanation as a less effective in relation to dangerousness and social distancing attitudes about mental illness than about homosexuality. The second experiment (N = 113) compared the effect of biological and free choice explanations on stigmatizing attitudes about abnormal sexual and eating behaviors. The results indicated that a biological explanation increased belief in essentialism and was most effective for attitudes related to anger and blame. These results suggest that the effectiveness of biological explanations as an antistigma tool varies according to the attitude and stigmatized group.     

Children's Earliest Experiences with Death: Circumstances,Conversations, Explanations,and Parental Satisfaction

Parents (n = 140) of children 2 to 7 years responded to an online survey regarding their children's experiences and conversations about death. A total of 75% of parents indicated that they had spoken to their child about death, and the majority of conversations were first initiated when children were between 3 and 3.5 years of age. Binary logistic regression analysis was used to explore factors that could predict conversations about death. Parents (n = 88) provided narratives of the explanations of death that they gave their child and subsequently reported their level of satisfaction with their explanation. The content of the explanations was coded and examined in relation to children's age and parental satisfaction. Results revealed that parents who provided explanations to a continued existence after death reported significantly higher levels of satisfaction than those parents who discussed the absence of a future physical relationship after death. Finally, explanations of a continued existence were not always in reference to an afterlife and could include discussing the memory of the deceased or their continued impact even after death. Thus, when talking to young children about death, parents may feel greater satisfaction in finding ways to discuss the continued legacy of those who have died compared to more biological explanations. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Developing Explanations and Developing Understanding: Students Explain the Phases of the Moon Using Visual Representations

This article presents a theoretical model of the process by which students construct and elaborate explanations of scientific phenomena using visual representations. The model describes progress in the underlying conceptual processes in students’ explanations as a reorganization of fine-grained knowledge elements based on the Knowledge in Pieces perspective. The core case study involved a pair of fifth-grade students who generated visual representations to explain the phases of the moon and collaboratively elaborated and improved their representations and explanations. The model describes the process of developing explanations as iterations of temporarily stable stages of coherence. The progression from one temporary coherent structure to the next is described as the increase of Resolution and/or Range of the explanation. Resolution and Range are newly defined theoretical constructs. The model accounts for the continuity in the students’ developing understanding and highlights the productive nature of their intuitive knowledge resources.     

Rage Against the Machine: The Case for System‐Level Emotions

Although psychologists have generally conceptualized emotions in light of individual‐ and group‐ level approaches, in the current paper we propose that there are also system‐level emotional events, including both system‐based emotions (experienced as a direct or indirect consequence of system‐level characteristics) and system‐targeted emotions (reflecting evaluations that support or oppose the overarching social system). We begin by discussing how emotions are embedded in the social system and what system‐level functions they serve. We draw on system justification theory to understand the reciprocal relations between emotional life and ideologies that justify or challenge social systems. We then focus on three empirical propositions concerning the dynamics of system‐level emotions: (I) System‐based emotions reflect one’s subjective as well as objective standing in the social order; (II) System‐based emotions reflect one’s subjective appraisal of the social order; and (III) System‐level emotions affect action tendencies and behaviors, including behaviors that promote system stability versus change. The investigation of system‐level emotions promises to deepen our scientific understanding of the motivational dynamics of social stability and social change and to uncover the affective dimension of system justification processes. Extending the social psychological analysis of emotions to include contextual features at the level of social systems builds a much‐needed bridge between emotion research in psychology and sociology.     

The Evolution and Social Dynamics of Compassion

The inner processes that make compassion possible arose from the evolutionary advantage of caring for others, especially offspring, kin and in‐group allies. This paper explores issues in defining compassion and its link to similar concepts such as altruism. It also explores compassion as a social motive and social mentality that choreographs social interactions and how the successful enactment of compassion is dependent on certain competencies such as sympathy, empathy, perspective taking, and distress tolerance (among others), as well as social contexts. As a motivational system, compassion has to compete with other socially choreographed motives, such as tribalism and individualistic competitiveness – much darker sides of the human psyche that have been harmful in human history. One of the challenges for compassion is to explore not only how it can promote personal well‐being but also how it can counteract the destructive sides of our other motives and social mentalities.     

Empathy,honour, and the apprenticeship of violence: rudiments of a psychohistorical critique of the individualistic science of evil

Research seeking to explain the perpetration of violence and atrocities by humans against other humans offers both social and individualistic explanations, which differ namely in the roles attributed to empathy. Prominent social models suggest that some manifestations of inter-human violence are caused by parochial attitudes (attitudes characterized by interests centred on one's own community) and obedience reinforced by within-group empathy. Individualistic explanations of violence, by contrast, posit that stable intra-individual characteristics of the brain and personality of some individuals lead them to commit violence and atrocities. An individualistic explanation argues that the chief cause of violence is the perpetrator’'s lack of empathy with the victim. To offer the rudiments of a critique of the individualistic approach, I critically examine a model stating that violence is caused by empathy erosion (Baron-Cohen 2011). Specifically, the discussion of the empathy-erosion model is applied to the case of honour-based violence (HBV), a type of violence known for its communal character. Building from prior enquiries into violence and social cognition, I argue that an empathy-erosion explanation of HBV is defective because it does not consider important cultural and historical enablers of violence. Finally, as an alternative to individualism, I propose a psychohistorical approach to HBV in the migration context. This alternative combines psychological and philosophical enquiry with historical and ethnographical analysis. The psychohistorical approach hypothesises that distinct processes of cultural learning of honour codes both scaffold HBV and modulate the perpetrators’ emotions and empathy.

     

Using Social Representations Theory to Examine Lay Explanation of Contemporary Social Crises: The Case of Ireland's Recession

Social actors operate under a basic imperative to construct explanations for the events that surround them. Many issues that dominate the societal agenda today are not available to direct perception, derive from traditionally expert domains and are relatively remote from immediate local experience. This presents a challenge for lay explanation of these issues. Social representations theory offers a useful framework through which the construction of lay explanation for such issues can be examined. The current study recruited this theoretical framework to investigate lay explanations of the recent economic recession in Ireland. Data consisted of semi‐structured interviews with 14 members of the public and a web‐based survey (N = 138). The data suggested that explanations for the recession could be organised into three major themes: Power, Ordinary People and Fatalism. Strictly economic explanations were eschewed; instead, people drew upon a wide range of ideas about society, politics, morality, public spheres and personhood. The implications of these findings for understanding lay explanation of contemporary social crises are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

De-Ontologizing the Debate on Social Explanations: A Pragmatic Approach Based on Epistemic Interests

In a recent paper on realism and pragmatism published in this journal, Osmo Kivinen and Tero Piiroinen have been pleading for more methodological work in the philosophy of the social sciences—refining the conceptual tools of social scientists—and less philosophically ontological theories. Following this de-ontologizing approach, we scrutinize the debates on social explanation and contribute to the development of a pragmatic social science methodology. Analyzing four classic debates concerning explanation in the social sciences, we propose to shift the debate away from (a) the ontologizing defenses of forms of social explanation, and (b) a winner-takes-all-approach. Instead, we advocate (c) a pragmatic approach towards social explanation, elaborating a rigorous framework for explanatory pluralism detached from the debates on social ontology.

The Social Value of Internal Explanations and the Norm of Internality

Since the 1970s, it has been agreed that ‘internal’ people, who explain what happens to them by internal explanations (their behaviors, their aptitudes, their efforts, their personality, etc.) were more likely to succeed than ‘external’ people, who explain the same outcomes by external explanations such as chance, situational difficulties, the power of others, or fate. The social superiority of internal people is explained in terms of their personality (locus of control). Looking further into the intuitions of American researchers, a French school of thought attempted to show that internal explanations are socially valued. It was suggested that there exists a social judgment norm that could be called the norm of internality and that, perhaps, the success of ‘internal’ people was more specifically due to the fact that social appraisers, whether in school, in organizations, in the courts of justice, prefer this type of person because such people adhere more easily to current social ways of functioning.     

Predicting marital satisfaction: Social absorption and individuation versus attachment anxiety and avoidance

The incremental validity of social absorption and social individuation in predicting relationship satisfaction beyond anxious and avoidant attachment was assessed in a sample of 400 heterosexual couples. Results indicated that the actor’s and partner’s social absorption scores and the absolute difference between the partners’ social individuation scores made significant unique contributions to the actor’s satisfaction in a model that included avoidant and anxious attachment. This model accounted for 49% of the variance in the actors’ satisfaction scores. Satisfaction was high when both partners were predisposed toward behavioral interdependence but suffered when the partners were discrepant in their need to cognitively distinguish self and other. Possible explanations for these findings and their implications for marital satisfaction are discussed.     

Intrinsic Explanation and Field’s Dispensabilist Strategy

Abstract

Hartry Field defended the importance of his nominalist reformulation of Newtonian Gravitational Theory, as a response to the indispensability argument, on the basis of a general principle of intrinsic explanation. In this paper, I argue that this principle is not sufficiently defensible, and can not do the work for which Field uses it. I argue first that the model for Field’s reformulation, Hilbert’s axiomatization of Euclidean geometry, can be understood without appealing to the principle. Second, I argue that our desires to unify our theories and explanations undermines Field’s principle. Third, the claim that extrinsic theories seem like magic is, in this case, really just a demand for an account of the applications of mathematics in science. Finally, even if we were to accept the principle, it would not favor the fictionalism that motivates Field’s argument, since the indispensabilist’s mathematical objects are actually intrinsic to scientific theory.     

Social Relations and Cyberbullying: The Influence of Individual and Structural Attributes on Victimization and Perpetration via the Internet

Current research indicates that an alarming number of students are affected by cyberbullying. However, most of the empirical research has focused on psychological explanations of the phenomenon. In an explorative survey study based on the reconstruction of 2 complete school networks (N_P = 408), we expand the explanation strategies of cyberbullying to higher levels of social abstraction. Using statistical and structural analysis, and visual inspection of network environments, we compare explanations on individual and structural levels. In line with previous research, the findings support traditional explanations via sociodemographic and personality factors. However, the findings also reveal network positioning to be a comparably strong predictor for cyberbullying. Therefore, we argue that without taking structural factors into account, individual explanations will remain insufficient.     

Idealizations and Concretizations in Laws and Explanations in Physics

The paper tries to provide an alternative to Hempel’s approach to scientific laws and scientific explanation as given in his D-N model. It starts with a brief exposition of the main characteristics of Hempel’s approach to deductive explanations based on universal scientific laws and analyzes the problems and paradoxes inherent in this approach. By way of solution, it analyzes the scientific laws and explanations in classical mechanics and then reconstructs the corresponding models of explanation, as well as the types of scientific laws appearing in it. Finally, it compares this reconstruction with the approaches of J. Woodward and C. Hitchcock, C. Liu and with the views of M. Thalos on analytic mechanics.

Humean explanations in the moral sciences

There is an essential tension in Hume's account of explanation in the moral sciences. He holds the familiar (though problematic) view that explanations of action are causal explanations backed by the laws of human nature. But he also tenders a rational and historical model of explanation which has been neglected in Hume studies. Developed primarily in the Essays and put into practice in the History of England, this model holds that explanations in the moral sciences cite agents’ reasons for acting in definite historical situations. Such explanations are context‐dependent, social (not psychological) in content, essentially post hoc, and provide insufficient grounds for prediction. The tension between Hume's two models is considerable, not to say inconsistent. We would best understand him as trying to reconcile the two. Each provides different and equally important kinds of intelligibility. Until this is appreciated, the one‐sided interpretation of Hume as a psychological reductionist and a covering‐law theorist will continue.     

Children's Explanations as a Window Into Their Intuitive Theories of the Social World

Social categorization is an early emerging and robust component of social cognition, yet the role that social categories play in children's understanding of the social world has remained unclear. The present studies examined children's (N = 52 four‐ and five‐year olds) explanations of social behavior to provide a window into their intuitive theories of how social categories constrain human action. Children systematically referenced category memberships and social relationships as causal‐explanatory factors for specific types of social interactions: harm among members of different categories more than harm among members of the same category. In contrast, they systematically referred to agents' mental states to explain the reverse patterns of behaviors: harm among members of the same category more than harm among members of different categories. These data suggest that children view social category memberships as playing a causal‐explanatory role in constraining social interactions.     

On Irrational Guilt

A person raised in a religious family may have been taught that going to the theater is not allowed, and even if he has rejected this taboo years ago, he still feels guilty when attending theater. These kinds of cases may not be rare, but they are strange. Indeed, one may wonder how they are even possible. This is why an explanation is needed, and in my paper I aim to give such an explanation. In particular, I will first provide a brief review of the explanations of irrational guilt that are compatible with the cognitive theories of emotions, that is, theories that presuppose that there is a causal or a constitutional connection between emotions and cognitive factors, such as judgments, beliefs or thoughts. Following many other reviewers, I found most of the explanations of irrational guilt unsatisfactory, although my reasons for critical conclusions will partly differ from the usual ones. After the review, I will defend a solution according to which it is possible to believe that an act does not have any moral costs and at the same time to have an impression that is has, which explains the guilty feelings.     

A Test of Two Competing Explanations for the Attraction-Enhancing Effects of Counselor Self-Disclosure

The authors tested two theoretical explanations for the attraction-enhancing effects of counselor self-disclosure: the similarity hypothesis and the social exchange hypothesis. A counseling analogue was constructed to discriminate between these two explanations by varying the valence (positive or negative) of the counselor's disclosure and its relevance (relevant or irrelevant) to the client's presenting problem. Dependent variables were perceptions of the counselor's attractiveness, empathy, and level of regard for the client. Results were mixed, supporting the social exchange explanation for empathy and the similarity explanation for level of regard.     

Kierkegaard's Social Theory

Despite recent attention on the social implications of his work, little has been done to articulate a substantive Kierkegaardian social theory. In this paper, I argue that Kierkegaard's A Literary Review describes four principles of social analysis. Together they reveal the social character of Kierkegaard's thought while presenting significant challenges for more traditional ‘social readings’ of his work.