> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >I absolutely deny that what is
> >called psychology can explain that fact -- it can only give
> >labels which, as Marx said of "Providence," are only a sort
> >of paraphrase of the facts, not an explanation.
What's an explanation? On one account, it is a sort of paraphrase of the facts,a highly general summary of the regularities that allow you to infer, given certain conditions, what will happen, because it always does. Granted, that is an empiricist notion of explanation that I do not hold.
But say an explanation is a matter of opening up the nuts and bolts to reveal the hidden causal mechanisms that produce the phenomena. This is a scientific realist notion of explanation. Well, a lot of psychology does that. Psycholoanalysis posits inner states such as unconscious wishes and subconscious drives. Cognitive psychology posits frames and schema and mental models and transformational grammars (there, whoever was complaining about Chomsky's linguistic not getting any play, I gave it some!), etc.
Maybe you think these explanations are no good. That might be because you think that each proposed explantion, one by one is no good, or because youy think that the process of attempting to explain behavior be reference to mental states is hopeless.
The philosopher Donald Davidson has argued for the latter proposition on the grounds, essentially, that all psychological explanations are rationalizing explanation, but rationalizing explanations are empty because with enough pushing and pulling you can rationalize anything. (Years ago I wrote a master's thesis on this; never published anything about it, though.) Maybe this is what you have in mind. That's strong, though. You can't be a historical materialist and hold this view.
--jks
>