Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A distinctive feature of connectionism as a research paradigm in psychology is use of a form of scientific explanation here termed dynamical explanation. In dynamical explanation, the behavior of a system is explained by reference to points and trajectories in an abstract state space. This paper contrasts dynamical explanation with some other major forms of scientific explanation, and discusses how dynamical explanation of the behavior of artificial neural networks can constitute genuine psychological explanation.