Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Rational analysis is an influential but contested account of howprobabilistic modeling can be used to construct non-mechanistic but self-standing explanatory models of the mind.In this paper, I disentangle and assess several possibleexplanatory contributions which could be attributed to rationalanalysis. Although existing models suffer from evidentialproblems that question their explanatory power, I argue thatrational analysis modeling can complement mechanistictheorizing by providing models of environmental affordances.