Behaviorism and eliminativism represent significant challenges to the scientific legitimacy of folk psychological concepts and explanations. Both views emphasize the explanatory inadequacies of folk psychological explanations of human behavior, but they differ with respect to the theoretical framework that they hypothesize will take its place. B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism maintained that folk psychological explanations would eventually be replaced by explanations in terms of reinforcement contingencies. In contrast, the eliminativism of Paul and Patricia Churchland contends that folk psychological explanations will eventually be replaced by neuroscientific explanations. The motivations and implications of each of these views are discussed.
Despite the growing interest in collaborative teaching in higher education, there is a paucity of research on its use and effectiveness in philosophy curricula. The research that does exist focuses almost exclusively on interdisciplinary collaboration or student and faculty attitudes regarding the practice. This paper aims to address these gaps by describing a semester long, multi-section study designed to assess the impact of team teaching on student classroom performance and related variables in an Introduction to Philosophy course. The results of the study show that students overwhelmingly prefer team teaching to individual instruction and think that it positively impacts their learning and classroom experience. However, the results also show that there is no statistically significant relationship between delivery method and students’ classroom performance. The paper concludes with a discussion of some limitations with the research design and the potential benefits and challenges of implementing team teaching within introductory philosophy courses.
Contemporary personalized psychiatry faces head-on the tension to be individualized and patient-centered, while also striving to be scientific. We explore this tension by applying two accounts of scientific causal explanation, Woodward’s interventionist account and Silva, Landreth, and Bickle’s metascientific account, to recent research in social neuroscience and environmental epigenetics that bear directly on psychopathology. We’re less concerned in this chapter with which account of causal-mechanistic explanation is right, although we will have some comments about the relative advantages of each. Instead we stress two lessons for personalized psychiatry. First, properly understood, basic scientific research is not necessarily inconsistent with the aims of personalized psychiatry. There are even ways the former can advance the latter. Second, non-epistemic considerations such as clinical utility and therapeutic applicability partly determine which account of scientific causal explanation best fits with reasonable interpretations of personalized psychiatry, including questions about the most appropriate level at which to explain psychiatric disorders.
The scientific legitimacy of explanatory variables in psychology was a central debate among behavioral theorists beginning in the 1930s. In 1948, MacCorquodale and Meehl proposed a useful distinction between intervening variables and hypothetical constructs. Hypothetical constructs entail the existence of unobservable entities or processes, whereas intervening variables are merely convenient labels used to describe the relationship between environmental stimuli and behavioral responses and do not imply the existence of any unobservable entity or process. Philosophical issues associated with each type of variable are discussed.
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