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ABSTRACT: Despite its diminished importance amongst philosophers, the deductive-nomological framework is still important to contemporary behavioral scientists. Behavioral theorists operating within this framework must be careful to distinguish between nesting and chaining. Explanations are chained when the explanandum sentence of one explanation is one of the antecedent conditions of another. They are nested when one of the antecedent conditions or the explanandum sentence of one explanation is one of the covering laws of another. Confusion between nesting and chaining leads to explanation nests that cannot be nomologically entrenched. They cannot, even in principle, be logically connected to laws arising from other sciences. This hazard should be particularly important for evolutionary psychologists to avoid, since many evolutionary psychologists tend to see themselves as dedicated to both nomological entrenchment and cognitive functionalist models. The hazard can be avoided if the intentional constructs of the behavioral sciences are construed not as ineffable and inaccessible antecedent conditions, but as complex, law-like patterns in behavior.
Key words: explanation, Hempel, evolutionary psychology, New Realism, behaviorism
The Perils of Confusing Nesting with Chaining in Psychological Explanations
For more than a decade we have been working on the implications of Hempelian analysis of the social sciences sketched by Rosenberg (1988) in his Philosophy of Social Science. While perhaps out of fashion in philosophical circles, the deductive-nomological pattern of thinking is still widely embraced in the behavioral sciences (i.e., behavior scientists still frequently conceptualize their investigations as seeking to falsifying logical deductions from theory). Thus, we think our exploration and elaboration of Rosenberg's views has been useful in identifying some pitfalls in behavioral explanation and in suggesting how these pitfalls might be avoided (Derr & Thompson, 1992; Thompson & Derr, 1995, 2000). In the meantime, the need to make the social and behavioral sciences compatible with the biological and physical sciences has been reemphasized by the flowering of the field of evolutionary psychology, which seeks to bolt the behavioral sciences firmly to the bedrock of evolutionary biology. Cosmides, Tooby, and Barkow (1992), in a manifesto1 that evoked the Unity of Science movement of the 1930s, declared that psychology would not be made honest as a field until each of its concepts and findings was related to the biological and physical sciences. Thus,...
