This chapter focuses on what sort of explanatory practices are distinctive of experimental or scientific psychology. A cursory look at the history of the discipline – particularly, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – reveals a rich collage of explanatory forms and strategies that have been invoked to render intelligible our mental lives and behavioral repertoires. Technological developments led theorists such as Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver to provide a mathematical characterization of information, and others such as Alan Turing and Emil Post to explore how it might be manipulated formally in mechanical systems. The dominant account in twentieth-century epistemology represented knowledge linguaformally, with propositions reporting sensory experiences justifying, by their logical relations, those propositions that do not. By accommodating both a reductionist and an emergentist perspective, mechanistic explanation provides a unifying framework that integrates a variety of explanatory projects in psychology.
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