On approaches to explaining cardiovascular reactivity: toward explanations that explain

Abstract

The control-system mode of analysis proposed by Pavloski for cardiovascular reactivity phenomena is a purposive or teleological form of explanation, because the explicans has purpose as the central term. The problem with such explanations is that they are circular and empty, providing only a rhetorical feeling of understanding, and absence of strong-inference research. The S-O-R approach, which Pavlovski opposes, provides at least the potential for non-circular explanations, provided that the O-related explanatory constructs are specified in normal cause-effect terms so that, in another context, the explicans can also serve as an explicandum, and vice-versa. Pavloski may be right in suggesting that the evidence requires a feedback, "control-system" construct to account for cardiovascular reactivity phenomena (although he is far from having proved this in his paper), but such a view would need to be supplemented by (non-purposive) control-system explanations that really explain in the logical rather than the merely rhetorical sense of that term.