There is a wealth of evidence that people's reasoning is influenced by explanatory considerations. Little is known, however, about the exact form this influence takes, for instance about whether the influence is unsystematic or because of people's following some rule. Three experiments investigate the descriptive adequacy of a precise proposal to be found in the philosophical literature, to wit, that we should infer to the best explanation, provided certain additional conditions are met. The first experiment studies the relation between the quality of an explanation and people's willingness to infer that explanation when only one candidate explanation is given. The second experiment presents participants always with two explanations and investigates the effect of the presence of an alternative on the participants' willingness to infer the target explanation. Although Experiments 1 and 2 manipulate explanation quality and willingness to infer to the best explanation between participants, Experiment 3 manipulates those measures within participants, thereby allowing to study the influence of explanatory considerations on inference at the individual level. The third experiment also studies the connection between explanation quality, willingness to infer, and metacognitive confidence in the decision to infer. The main conclusions that can be drawn from these experiments are that (a) the quality of an explanation is a good predictor of people's willingness to accept that explanation, and a better predictor than the prior probability of the explanation, and (b) if more than one possible explanation is given, people are the less willing to infer the best explanation the better they deem the second-best explanation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

No abstract

No abstract

Conspiracy theories are alternative explanations of well-understood events or phenomena. What makes them attractive explanations to so many people? We investigate whether people ascribe characteristics typical of good explanations to conspiracy theories and whether they are perceived as more appealing explanations when they are articulated as a refutation of the official version of events. In two experiments, participants read explanations of four conspiracy theories and rated them along six dimensions of explanatory quality. We find that some explanatory virtues are ascribed to conspiracy theories even by people who do not believe the conspiracy. Contrary to our predictions, we also find that framing a conspiracy as a refutation did not generally elicit higher ascriptions of explanatory virtues. These results suggest that explanatory considerations may play a more central role in conspiracist beliefs than was previously thought.

According to the philosophical theory of inferentialism and its psychological counterpart, Hypothetical Inferential Theory (HIT), the meaning of an indicative conditional centrally involves the strength of the inferential connection between its antecedent and its consequent. This paper states, for the first time, the implications of HIT for the probabilities of conditionals. We report two experiments comparing these implications with those of the suppositional account of conditionals, according to which the probability of a conditional equals the corresponding conditional probability. A total of 358 participants were presented with everyday conditionals across three different tasks: judging the probability of the conditionals; judging the corresponding conditional probabilities; and judging the strength of the inference from antecedent to consequent. In both experiments, we found inference strength to be a much stronger predictor of the probability of conditionals than conditional probability, thus supporting HIT.