kinds of action explanation
I've noticed over the years that scientifically minded psychologists tend to collapse all explanation and understanding into a causal form. If I ask 'how?' or 'why?' questions about human behaviour, thought, or feeling, what I'm inexorably after, they seem to suggest, are causes. The idea of there being different kinds of causes - e.g. the three kinds met with in the bio-psycho-social model - is of course utterly widespread. But the idea that many psychological explanations may be non-causal in character seems very often to be missing from view. And all too often explanations which are not at all causal in form get confusingly dressed up in causal garb. My own contention is that most of what is valuable in psychological explanation is non-causal in form. But let me begin with a word about this term 'cause'. In English today we tend to describe causes as what makes something happen. "Why did the chimney pot fall?" "It's because the he...
