Functional explanation and the function of explanation

Lombrozo, Tania; Carey, Susan

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2004.12.009

Cited by 242 publications

(214 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…These views are echoed in Artificial Intelligence (AI), where surprise has been identified as a cognitive mechanism for identifying learning events in robotic, agent architectures (Bae & Young, 2008Macedo & Cardoso, 2001;Macedo, Reisenzein & Cardoso, 2004;Macedo, Cardoso, Reisenzein, Lorini, & Castelfranchi, 2009). Traditionally, explanation is seen as playing a role in building causal models or predictive schemas to deal with future events (Heider, 1958;Lombrozo & Carey, 2006). However, apart from having a predictive role when a new situation is initially encountered, explanation may also serve to help people decide how information should be weighted or how attention should be allocated, as events occur (Keil, 2006).…”

Section: Explanation Surprise and Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty

Foster

Keane

2015

Cognitive Psychology

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The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! (@ucd_oa) Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. TitleWhy some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty Publisher's statement This is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Cognitive Psychology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Cognitive Psychology (VOL 81, ISSUE 2015, (2015 Early theories of surprise, including Darwin's, argued that it was predominantly a basic emotion. Recently, theories have taken a more cognitive view of surprise, casting it as a process of "making sense of surprising events". The current paper advances the view that the essence of this sense-making process is explanation; specifically, that people's perception of surprise is a metacognitive estimate of the cognitive work involved in explaining an abnormal event. So, some surprises are more surprising because they are harder toexplain. This proposal is tested in eight experiments that explore how (i) the contents of memory can influence surprise, (ii) different classes of scenarios can retrieve more/less relevant knowledge from memory to explain surprising outcomes, (iii) how partial explanations constrain the explanation process reducing surprise, (iv) how, overall, any factor that acts to increase the cognitive work in explaining a surprising event, results in higher levels of surprise (e.g., task demands to find several rather than just one explanation). Across the present studies, using a many different materials, paradigms and measures, it is consistently and repeatedly found that the difficulty of explaining a surprising outcome is the best predictor for people's perceptions of the surprisingness of events. Alternative accounts of these results are considered, as are future directions for this research.

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Section: Explanation Surprise and Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty

Foster

Keane

2015

Cognitive Psychology

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“…Instead, we are interested in the psychological question of which modes of explanation we do use in our common sense reasoning and the types of principles and representations these modes of explanation require. For a review of different formulations of the teleological principle within the psychological literature, see Lombrozo and Carey (2006). For alternative formulations of the causal principle, see Bullock, Baillargeon, and Gelman (1982).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representation of Principled Connections: A Window Onto the Formal Aspect of Common Sense Conception

2009

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Nominal concepts represent things as tokens of types. Recent research suggests that we represent principled connections between the type of thing something is (e.g., DOG) and some of its properties (k-properties; e.g., having four legs for dogs) but not other properties (t-properties; e.g., being brown for dogs). Principled connections differ from logical, statistical, and causal connections. Principled connections license (i) the expectation that tokens of the type will generally possess their k-properties, (ii) formal explanations (i.e., explanation of the presence of k-properties in tokens of a type by reference to the type of thing it is), and (iii) normative expectations concerning the presence of k-properties in tokens of the type. The present paper investigates the hypothesis that representing principled connections requires representing properties as aspects of being the relevant kind of thing (Aspect Hypothesis). Experiment 1 provides a direct test of the Aspect Hypothesis. Experiments 2 and 3 provide indirect tests of the Aspect Hypothesis. All three experiments provide support for the Aspect Hypothesis. Experiment 4 investigates a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis concerning the manner in which formal explanations are licensed by principled connections. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis concerning the nature of the normative expectations licensed by principled connections. Together these results provide strong evidence for the idea that representing principled connections involves representing a property as being an aspect of being a given kind of thing. The results also help clarify the manner in which formal explanation differs from other modes of explanation. Finally, the results of the experiments are used to motivate a proposal concerning the formal structure of the conceptual representations implicated by principled connections. This structure provides a domain-general way of structuring our concepts and embodies the perspective we take when we think and talk of things as being instances of a kind.

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“…Owing to limitations of space, we have not been able to say anything about experimental work on causation by absence or omission (Livengood and Machery 2007;Wolff et al 2010; and references therein), causal explanation (Livengood and Machery 2007;Lombrozo 2006Lombrozo , 2007Lombrozo , 2010Lombrozo and Carey 2006); the significance of causal language (Talmy 1988;Wolff et al 2005;Wolff and Song 2003); or the relationship between causal attribution and judgments of moral or legal responsibility Lagnado 2010, 2012) to name just a few of many topics related to causal attribution.…”

Section: Open Questions and Neglected Topicsmentioning

confidence: 99%