How to Explain Behavior: A Critical Review and New Approach

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In How to Explain Behavior: A Critical Review and New Approach, Sam S. Rakover proposes a critical review of explanation models (procedures); presents explanation as an essential part of research methodology; depicts understanding as based on explanation models and other procedures; provides a list of basic ideas common to most explanation models; supplies an approach that unifies mechanistic explanations as used by the sciences with mentalistic explanations that are based on one's inner world; and provides a general procedure for explaining individual behavior.

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How to Explain Behavior: A Critical Review and New Approach is at once a general introduction to psychological explanation and an original mature theory on the nature of such explanation. It is to be hoped that this work will be widely read not only by psychologists, philosophers, and historians of science, but by all those motivated by the struggles of a gifted thinker who is forging his way toward a foundation for his discipline. -- Daniel Algom, Tel-Aviv University
Sam S. Rakovers provocative book consists of a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the conceptual problems involved in the explanation of organismic behavior which concludes with a bold, creative suggestion of an original model that skillfully combines complementary mechanistic (causal) and mentalistic (teleological) explanations which together may account for both the external (explicit responses) and internal (implicit will and belief) behavioral processes. -- Israel Nachson, Bar Ilan University, professor emeritus
Knowing that Sam S. Rakover is a psychologist, his dual methodology and multi-explanation framework that appear in this book can be considered as an essential epistemological step toward an overall explanation of the realities (epistemological ontologies) of the mind and brain (i.e., my epistemologically different worlds perspective). -- Gabriel Vacariu, Bucharest University, author of Illusions of Human Thinking

Author Bio

Sam S. Rakover is professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa.