The role of neuroscience for psychological causal explanation
Abstract
Psychology provides causal explanations of behavior but it remains contested whether such explanations are scientifically legitimate without grounding in neuroscience. Two prominent arguments have been put forward to argue for the dependence of psychology on neuroscience: the classical causal exclusion argument argues that higher-level causes are excluded by lower-level causes; According to a more recent line of argument, variables and relations postulated by psychological models must correspond to variables and relations in neuroscientific models – otherwise the psychological model can only provide how-possibly explanation but not how-actually explanation. In this article, we defend the independence of psychological causal explanation. Based on an interventionist account of causation, we argue that a psychological model is causally explanatory when it identifies variables that serve as points of intervention. Still, we show that neuroscience sometimes has a crucial role for validating psychological models: when a psychological model identifies points of interventions that cannot be intervened on at the psychological level.
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BibTeX
@misc{krickel2026role,
title = {{The role of neuroscience for psychological causal explanation}},
author = {Beate Krickel and Markus Werkle-Bergner},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/cfu7g_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cfu7g_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The role of neuroscience for psychological causal explanation
AU - Beate Krickel
AU - Markus Werkle-Bergner
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/cfu7g_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cfu7g_v1/
AB - Psychology provides causal explanations of behavior but it remains contested whether such explanations are scientifically legitimate without grounding in neuroscience. Two prominent arguments have been put forward to argue for the dependence of psychology on neuroscience: the classical causal exclusion argument argues that higher-level causes are excluded by lower-level causes; According to a more recent line of argument, variables and relations postulated by psychological models must correspond to variables and relations in neuroscientific models – otherwise the psychological model can only provide how-possibly explanation but not how-actually explanation. In this article, we defend the independence of psychological causal explanation. Based on an interventionist account of causation, we argue that a psychological model is causally explanatory when it identifies variables that serve as points of intervention. Still, we show that neuroscience sometimes has a crucial role for validating psychological models: when a psychological model identifies points of interventions that cannot be intervened on at the psychological level.
ER -