The productive explanation model in psychology and beyond

Jan Sprenger (University of Turin)

The explanation of psychological phenomena is a central aim of psychological science. However, the criteria for evaluating whether a theory explains a phenomenon are often unclear. Consequently, it is often unknown whether a given psychological theory indeed explains a phenomenon. We address this shortcoming by developing the productive model of explanation: a theory explains a phenomenon if and only if a formal model of the theory produces the statistical pattern representing the phenomenon. Using this account, we outline a practically workable methodology of scientific explanation: (a) explicating a verbal theory into a formal model, (b) representing phenomena as statistical patterns in data, and (c) assessing whether the formal model produces these statistical patterns. Finally, we compare our framework to existing models of explanation from philosophy of science.