Ecological Mechanistic Research and Modelling

There is a recent literature in philosophy that has developed a taxonomy of scientific explanations for phenomena, the kinds of models we use, and the research programmes that produce the explanations and models. Roughly, there are two basic research programmes. The first programme takes some capacity of a system and maps out how it works by breaking it down into various sub-capacities, each with their own distinct characteristics. The end goal is a functional model, a ‘how-possibly’ box-and-arrow type explanation of how a capacity such as memory is organised. The second programme instead focuses on analytically decomposing a proposed mechanism that produces a phenomena into real parts and processes. Empirical work focuses on establishing that the proposed parts are part of the actual mechanism being modelled, and localising where those parts live and how they contribute to implementing the phenomena. The end goal is a dynamical mechanistic model, a ‘how-actually’ explanation in which each model part explicitly represents the dynamics of a real part or process. Mechanistic models, when they are possible to develop, are considered to be the best form of scientific explanation of a phenomena. Ecological psychology has, so far, widely resisted becoming a mechanistic science. This is in part due to our objections to mechanistic, Cartesian ontologies, and more recently because it’s not clear we can meaningfully decompose the systems we study in order to develop such models. I will argue here that both of these concerns are unfounded, that ecological psychology is actually perfectly capable of developing mechanistic models, and that therefore we should do so, in order to gain the benefits.