Explaining the Brain

Abstract

What distinguishes good explanations in neuroscience from bad? This book constructs and defends standards for evaluating neuroscientific explanations that are grounded in a systematic view of what neuroscientific explanations are: descriptions of multilevel mechanisms. In developing this approach, it draws on a wide range of examples in the history of neuroscience (e.g., Hodgkin and Huxley's model of the action potential and LTP as a putative explanation for different kinds of memory), as well as recent philosophical work on the nature of scientific explanation.