10.6.1—
A Better Description of Scientific Practice

First, the alternative approach is in closer accordance with the facts of scientific practice. The kinds of metaphysical and epistemic constraints required for strong naturalization are often missing in paradigm examples of good theories in other sciences. Scientific progress has often come, for example, in the form of laws relating several variables in the absence of any metaphysical necessity or conceptual adequacy relating those variables, and also in the absence of any microexplanation of why the law should hold. Most laws, when they were discovered at least, expressed relationships that were metaphysically contingent and epistemically opaque. If this is good enough for, say, Newton's laws, why should we hold psychology to a more stringent standard?

It is also plainly the case that, say, experimental psychologists and psychophysicists do not seem to feel a need to vindicate the phenomena they study (at any rate, no more than do practitioners of any other sciences), and that phenomenological and intentional description often play important roles in the initial description of problems that it is the job of theoretical psychology to solve. And the kind of "explanation" of, say, "seeing a red square" that is sought by a vision theorist does not require anything like metaphysically sufficient conditions.

Finally, one can point to anecdotal evidence from joint meetings in which psychologists are frustrated and baffled by the problems that divide

philosophers. My experience thus far has been that the characterization I have presented of where psychological concerns end and purely philosophical ones begin has been almost universally well received by psychologists, modelers, and neuroscientists, though often more controversial among philosophers.