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Equilibrium explanations are pervasive in economics and biology. They are also becoming more frequent in the social sciences due to the widespread adoption of economic (and sometimes biological) explanatory models. For example, economist Edward Lazear has recently (2000) claimed that the adherence to equilibrium concepts is a major factor contributing to the ‘scientific’ status of economics.

The environment in which our cognitive processes operate is crucial for understanding their current form, their reliability, and their function. In the following pages I will look at the role the environment plays in psychological explanations of cognitive behaviour, also when the explanations are not of an evolutionary character. In particular, I will focus on how environmental considerations (broadly) help us explain the or the of a psychological process.

All children learn or acquire their first language during a relatively short period in childhood. Individual variation or differences in learning environments seem to have very little influence on this process. Basically, every human being acquires a native language in essentially the same way. These facts have long puzzled linguists and psychologists. Generally speakin, there have been two competing accounts of this phenomenon, the empiricist’s story and the nativist’s story.

One of the things that distinguish natural kinds from mere anthropocentric kinds is that the former have an explanatory role to play in scientific reasoning, while the latter do not. One might, as Alexander Bird puts it, “randomly collect diverse things and give the collection a name, but one would not expect it to explain anything to say that a certain object belonged to this collection”. It is difficult to see what natural laws or explanations involve notions that are dictated by our anthropocentric predilections and easier to see the explanatory significance of kinds that exist independently of our conventions.