Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

argument that explanatory understanding cannot be based
on a local dyadic relation between the explanandum and
the explanans. Instead, understanding has to be a global
property of the whole belief system. (Friedman 1974;
Schurz and Lambert 1994)
This global conception of understanding is based on
an attribution error. The fact that an explanation fits well
into a systematic web of beliefs usually makes it easier to
understand, but it is not what constitutes understanding. A
more natural way to interpret understanding is to regard it
as an ability to answer counterfactual what-if-things-hadbeen-different-questions.
(Woodward 2003, 191; Ylikoski
2008). Explanations show what made a difference to the
explanandum. Here understanding is a local affair:
understanding is attributed based on ability make correct
counterfactual inferences about the phenomenon. It does
not matter for the understanding of a particular
phenomenon whether the things that made a difference to
it are themselves explained. That is a different, partially
independent question. There is no need of a fundament.
Most intentional fundamentalists are in principle
committed to the causal-mechanistic conception of
explanation: they are trying to explain the properties of
social wholes by laying out the causally relevant properties
of their parts (individuals) and the pattern of their
interaction. However, the causal-mechanistic conception of
explanation and the global, fundamentalist conception of
understanding do not fit together: there is no reason to
expect that the putative fundament would always pick out
the causally relevant factors. First, in many cases, the
causally relevant factors in RCT-models are actually
structural or institutional factors. Individual behavior may
be institutionally constrained so as to be rational only in an
“as if” –sense, or the explanandum may be robust with
respect to the behavioral assumptions. The details of
intentional level can thus be explanatorily irrelevant. (Satz
and Ferejohn 1994; Lehtinen and Kuorikoski 2007)
Second, reconstructing the behavior in terms of rational
intentional action might misdescribe the actual causes of
behavior. A growing body of social psychological research
on behavior priming and post-hoc rationalization supports
this claim (Wilson 2004). Hence, intentional description
can be misleading. This is not the age-old argument that,
on purely conceptual grounds, intentional explanation
cannot be causal explanation, but an empirical claim about
the relationship between folk-psychology and human
behavior.
As Carl Craver (2007, Ch. 4) has pointed out,
although the search for mechanistic explanations involves
opening black boxes, complete mechanistic explanations
are not really eliminative, because they incorporate factors
in multiple different levels of mechanisms. The goal of
mechanistic explanation is not to reduce different levels to
single bedrock, but to understand the systematic
dependencies between entities in different levels of
organization. Neither does mechanistic explanation regard
the lower levels as somehow sacrosanct: lower level
concepts and conceptions may be altered in the face of
new empirical discoveries or conceptual changes
concerning upper (or even lower) level phenomena. These
are bad news for the intentional fundamentalist.
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Intentional Fundamentalism — Petri Ylikoski / Jaakko Kuorikoski
3. The Dimensions of Explanatory Power
We have argued elsewhere (Ylikoski & Kuorikoski 2008)
that the intuitive notion of explanatory power is related to
five distinct dimensions that can be in conflict with each
other. The five dimensions of explanatory goodness are
non-sensitivity, precision, factual accuracy, degree of integration,
and cognitive salience. All other often cited criteria
for evaluating explanations, like simplicity, unification or
mechanistic detail, are derivate of these basic dimensions.
Could some of the appeal of intentional fundamentalism be
explained in terms of these dimensions?
The appeal of intentional fundamentalism derives
from the cognitive salience of our folk psychological
practice. Cognitive salience refers to the ease with which
the reasoning behind the explanation can be followed, how
easily the implications of the explanation can be seen and
how easy it is to evaluate the scope of the explanation and
identify possible defeaters or caveats. To the extent that
RCT belongs to the family of folk psychological theories,
and once its technical concepts are internalized, people
can be extremely fluent in its use. It only requires the
translation of everyday folk psychological accounts to the
more abstract language of beliefs and preferences. The
ease of use and the broad scope of application of
intentional vocabulary give rise to the impression of a
strong theory. If RCT is a formalization of our everyday
intentional explanatory practice, the feeling that intentional
explanations are final and do not give rise to additional
question is easily explained: in our everyday explanatory
practice we do not usually attempt to go beyond the
intentional scheme of explanation. In fact, people have
difficulties in figuring out what these explanations would
look like. The mistake here is to assume that cognitive
salience is a reliable indicator of overall explanatory power.
What the intentional fundamentalist does not recognize is
the fact that in the case of RCT there are important tradeoffs
between the dimensions of explanatory power. To
show this, we will next consider how well intentional
rational explanations measure up against some other
dimensions.
Let us start with the non-sensitivity. It refers to the
sensitivity of the explanatory relationship to the changes in
the background conditions. The less sensitive the
explanation is to these changes, more robust and powerful
it is. A robust explanation can answer a wider set of whatif-things-had-been-different
-questions. If we focus on
individual explanations, rational choice explanations can
be extremely sensitive in that sometimes a small change in
the beliefs or desires of the agent can bring about a drastic
change in behavior. However, sometimes these
explanations can also be robust, so everything depends on
the kinds of changes in background assumptions we are
talking about. Therefore it does not make sense to make
generalizations about the sensitivity of rational choice
explanations. However, one might be tempted to make
such generalizations if one considers the robustness of
RCT as an explanatory scheme. Like folk psychology in
general, RCT provides extremely flexible vocabulary for
describing behavior and for revising explanatory accounts.
If one intentional description of behavior is shown to be
false, it can always be replaced with a new one that
incorporates the problematic observations. This flexibility
gives an impression of a general and strong explanatory
theory, although these are really properties of the
explanatory vocabulary, not of the substantial theory.
Explanatory power, understood as non-sensitivity, is in this
case illusory.