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chapter title verso 14 Understanding in Psychology Is Understanding a Surplus? k a i e i g n e R L Since Thomas Kuhn’s characterization of science by means of a list of epistemic values that provide “the shared basis for theory choice,” there is a debate in philosophy of science about what the epistemic values of science are (for example, Kuhn 1977; McMullin 1983; Longino 1990; Lacey 2005). Kuhn’s list comprised such values as empirical accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity , and fruitfulness (Kuhn 1977, 321–22), which, as he argued, can be seen as constitutive of science. An enterprise could have different criteria for judging theories, but then it would not be science (331). In this chapter, I argue that the lists of epistemic values that are constitutive of science as proposed by philosophers, such as Kuhn, Ernan McMullin, Helen Longino, and Hugh Lacey, lack a highly important element, namely intelligibility . By means of an empirical case study I will show that scientific models, which enable the connection between theory and the world, can only give us scientific knowledge about phenomena if these models are intelligible. My argument is based on a case study of neobehaviorism. This case is interesting for the study of philosophy of science not only because of the huge influence of neobehaviorism on psychology in particular and on science in general , but also on account of its extraordinary positivistic inclination. Between 1930 and 1960, when psychology as academic enterprise grew enormously and neobehaviorism was the leading discipline in American psychology, the neobehaviorists advocated a view of science that was heavily influenced by 271 de Regt Txt•.indd 271 9/8/09 11:27:19 AM 272 logical positivism, which included, among other things, the requirement that all subjective elements should be banished from science. Because of their positivistic attitude, neobehaviorists were called “black-box psychologists”: they considered the organism as a black box with observable stimuli as input and observable responses as output, and they rejected any allegedly metaphysical speculation about the mechanisms inside this black box. Metaphorically speaking , opening the box would not yield “insight.” Instead, they declared as the aim of psychology to find functional relationships that describe the correlations between stimuli and responses. This positivistic tendency makes neobehaviorism highly relevant to a study on intelligibility and understanding. Insofar as understanding and intelligibility, with their subjective connotations, were allowed to play a role at all by the neobehaviorist doctrine, this was only in the context of discovery and not in the context of justification. By focusing on two leading figures of neobehaviorism, Edward C. Tolman (1886–1959) and Clark L. Hull (1884–1952), I will show that, despite their positivistic ideas, in practice even the neobehaviorists aimed at insight and implicitly embraced intelligibility as an epistemic value. What might seem to be one of the strongest counterexamples of my claim appears in fact a corroboration of it, and as such provides a strong case in favor of my claim concerning intelligibility and understanding. In this chapter, I will offer a philosophical account of intelligibility and understanding based on the work of Henk de Regt, but with a shift in focus from theories to models. I will then present the case study of neobehaviorism and, by means of an analysis of the work of Tolman and Hull, in which I will use my philosophical account of intelligibility and understanding, I will demonstrate my claim about the constitutive value of intelligibility. Understanding Phenomena by Means of Intelligible Models A sketch of de Regt’s account of scientific understanding can be found in an article that was published in 2004 (see also chapter 2 of this volume). In that article de Regt draws on the intuition that scientifically understanding a phenomenon is not merely knowing the relevant scientific theories, laws, and background conditions, but in addition “being able to use” them in the case at hand (de Regt 2004, 101). Furthermore, he suggests that understanding a phenomenon requires a theory that is intelligible to the scientists who use it—a suggestion that we find again in de Regt and Dieks (2005) as the criterion for understanding phenomena (CUP). In line with this suggestion, de Regt defines the intelligibility of a theory as a positive value that scientists attribute to the cluster of virtues of this theory that help them in using the theory (de Regt 2004, 103). According to de Regt, intelligibility is not an intrinsic property of a theory; kai eigner de Regt Txt...

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