The structure and function of explanations

Lombrozo, Tania

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.08.004

Cited by 505 publications

(377 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…In particular, according to subsumption and unification theories, explanations appeal to regularities that subsume what's being explained under some kind of law (e.g., Hempel & Oppenheim, 1948) or explanatory pattern (e.g., Friedman, 1974;Kitcher, 1989). In so doing, they relate the particular fact or observation to a generalization that supports further inferences (Lombrozo, 2006(Lombrozo, , 2012Wellman & Liu, 2007). For example, by explaining Socrates' death by appeal to the consumption of a poisonous chemical contained within hemlock (i.e., coniine), one implicitly invokes the generalization that the chemical can cause death in humans.…”

Section: Explanation and Inferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining prompts children to privilege inductively rich properties

et al. 2014

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a b s t r a c tFour experiments with preschool-aged children test the hypothesis that engaging in explanation promotes inductive reasoning on the basis of shared causal properties as opposed to salient (but superficial) perceptual properties. In Experiments 1a and 1b, 3-to 5-year-old children prompted to explain during a causal learning task were more likely to override a tendency to generalize according to perceptual similarity and instead extend an internal feature to an object that shared a causal property. Experiment 2 replicated this effect of explanation in a case of label extension (i.e., categorization). Experiment 3 demonstrated that explanation improves memory for clusters of causally relevant (non-perceptual) features, but impairs memory for superficial (perceptual) features, providing evidence that effects of explanation are selective in scope and apply to memory as well as inference. In sum, our data support the proposal that engaging in explanation influences children's reasoning by privileging inductively rich, causal properties.

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Section: Explanation and Inferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining prompts children to privilege inductively rich properties

et al. 2014

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“…But Douven and Schupbach (2015a) found that, at least in some contexts, Bayes' rule is systematically violated because people's belief updates are influenced by explanatory considerations. These results did not come as a complete surprise, given that previous research had already shown that explanation plays a variety of roles in belief formation and in cognition more generally (Chi, de Leeuw, Chiu, and LaVancher 1994;Legare and Lombrozo 2014;Lombrozo 2006Lombrozo , 2007Lombrozo , 2012Pennington and Hastie 1992; for more recent results, see Walker, Lombrozo, Williams, Rafferty, and Gopnik 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Explanation, updating, and accuracy

Douven¹

2016

Journal of Cognitive Psychology

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There is evidence that people update their credences partly on the basis of explanatory considerations. Philosophers have recently argued that to minimise the inaccuracy of their credences, people's updates also ought to be partly based on such considerations. However, there are many ways in which explanatory considerations can factor into updating, not all of which minimise inaccuracy. It is an open question whether in their updating, people take explanatory considerations into account in a way that philosophers would deem recommendable. To address this question, we re-analyse data from an experiment reported in Douven and Schupbach, "The role of explanatory considerations in updating" (Cognition, 2015). ARTICLE HISTORY

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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%