Abstract
The nature of explanation is an important area of inquiry in philosophy
of science. Consensus has been that explanation in the cognitive and
brain sciences is typically a special case of causal explanation,
specifically, mechanistic explanation (Craver 2007). But recently there
has been increased attention to computational explanation in the brain
sciences, and to whether that can be understood as a variety of
mechanistic explanation. After laying out the stakes for a proper
understanding of scientific explanation, we consider the status of
computational explanation in the brain sciences by comparing the
mechanistic proposal to computational accounts advanced by Piccinini
(2015), Milkowski (2013)), Cao (2019), Chirimuuta (2014, 2018), and Ross
(Ross 2015, 2023). We argue that many of these accounts of computational
explanation in neuroscience can satisfy the same explanatory criteria as
causal explanations, but not all. This has implications for
interpretation of those computational explanations that satisfy
different criteria.