Ecological Mechanistic Research and Modelling

Abstract

A recent philosophical literature has developed a taxonomy of scientific explanations, models, and the two basic research programmes that produce them. The first programme takes some capacity of a system and maps out how it works by breaking it down into various sub-capacities, each with their own distinct characteristics. The end goal is a functional model, a ‘how-possibly’ box-and-arrow type map of the functional organisation of the capacity. The second programme instead focuses on analytically decomposing a proposed mechanism that produces a phenomenon into real parts and processes. The end goal is a dynamical mechanistic model, a ‘how-actually’ explanation in which each model part explicitly represents the dynamics of those real parts or processes. Mechanistic models are better explanations of phenomena. Ecological psychology has, so far, widely resisted becoming a mechanistic science. This is in part due to our objections to mechanistic, Cartesian ontologies, and more recently because it’s not clear we can meaningfully decompose the systems we study in order to develop such models. I will argue here that both of these concerns are unfounded, that ecological psychology is actually perfectly capable of developing mechanistic models, and that therefore we should do so, in order to gain the benefits.