Mental Mechanisms: What are the Operations?

An important goal of the cognitive sciences is to explain mental phenomena in terms of mechanisms. A mechanistic explanation requires characterizing the operations of the mechanism’s parts. The challenge in characterizing such operations is illustrated by an example from biology in which some investigators tried to characterize the internal operations in the same terms as the overall physiological system while others appealed to elemental chemistry. Before biochemistry became successful, researchers had to identify operations at a new level of organization—operations over molecular groups. Existing attempts at mechanistic explanation in cognitive science are in a situation comparable to the earlier stage in the biological example, drawing their inspiration either from overall psychological activities or from low-level neural processes, neither of which is likely to provide a successful account of the operations in mental mechanisms.