Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Apurva Ratan Murty | Assistant Professor, Psychology | Georgia Institute of Technology Jared Medina | Associate Professor, Psychology | Emory University "To Predict or To Explain" What is even the point of our science? Is it to build models that predict what brains and minds will do even if we don’t fully understand how, or is it to explain the inner workings of the mind and brain, even if our models fall short of accurate predictions or practical mental health benefits. In this debate-styled meeting, Jared Medina will argue for explanation as the soul of science. Without causal, interpretable, mechanistic accounts, we’re just playing with high-tech models and curve-fitting. For him the goal of our science is about generating understanding in human interpretable terms. On the opposing side, Apurva Ratan Murty will champion prediction as the only reliable test of scientific understanding. If your theory can’t predict new data, it has limited value. Models that generalize, however messy or uninterpretable, are