Philosophical criteria for psychological explanation

Abstract

A psychological explanation consists of a set of premises postulated to account for the occurrence of some behavioral phenomenon. This paper contends that an explanation should satisfy at least five philosophical criteria: (1) The explanation must be deductive; that is, it should be possible to deduce the occurrence to be explained from the premises. (2) The explanation must contain empirical meaning. It should not be a contradiction to assert that the explanation can be falsified by empirical observation. (3) The explanation must be predictive; that is, in principle, if the explanation were known in advance, the occurrence would have been predicted. (4) The explanation should contain a causal argument; in principle, the explanation identifies a means for control of the behavior to be explained. (5) The premises should be general. Other testable predictions should follow from the premises. Thus, the premises used in an explanation should be usable in explanations of other phenomena. Every good explanation leads to a new experiment that threatens to disprove it. © 1984, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.