Explanation and Psychological Mechanisms

Psychological science is facing an explanatory dead-end because it currently offers interpretations rather than scientific explanations without any way to move from mediators to mechanisms. The long-standing promise has always been that future investigators will transform mediators into mechanisms but this promise remains unfulfilled. The missing mechanism information might be discovered by new empirical methods that have yet to be developed, but presently there is little evidence of this. Another approach is to identify an explanatory narrative that already understands psychology in a way that provides the required causal mechanisms. Connectionist network models with sufficient mechanism information to effectively simulate/emulate psychological phenomena provide this perspective because they explain how psychological processing can take place or is brought about. Previously identified core and corollary connectionist network properties/principles function as psychological mechanisms from this perspective.