This chapter defends a causal-mechanical view of explanation in neuroscience by arguing against three other philosophical accounts of scientific explanation: Paul Churchland's representational account, Carl Hempel's covering-law (CL) model, and Philip Kitcher's unification model. Each of these models struggles to recover commonly accepted constraints on explanations, constraints that are easily satisfied by the causal-mechanical view. Two examples are considered to illustrate this point: the explanation of neurotransmitter release and the explanation of the action potential. The first example reveals several common constraints on acceptable explanations. The second example shows that even the most compelling example of a covering-law explanation in neuroscience is, in fact, more accurately understood as an example of a causal-mechanical explanation.
Keywords: neuroscience, scientific explanation, Paul Churchland, Carl Hempel, Philip Kitcher, representation, covering-law model, unification model,