How do cognitive neuroscientists explain phenomena like memory or language processing? This
book examines the different kinds of experiments and manipulative research strategies involved
in understanding and eventually explaining such phenomena. Against this background it
evaluates contemporary accounts of scientific explanation specifically the mechanistic and
interventionist accounts and finds them to be crucially incomplete. Besides mechanisms and
interventions cannot actually be combined in the way usually done in the literature. This book
offers solutions to both these problems based on insights from experimental practice. It
defends a new reading of the interventionist account highlights the importance of
non-interventionist studies for scientific inquiry and supplies a taxonomy of experiments that
makes it easy to see how the gaps in contemporary accounts of scientific explanation can be
filled. The book concludes that a truly empirically adequate philosophy of science must take
into account a much wider range of experimental research than has been done to date. With the
taxonomy provided this book serves a stepping-stone leading into a new era of philosophy of
science-for cognitive neuroscience and beyond.
