Understanding “Why:” How Implicit Questions Shape Explanation Preferences

Abstract

Adults and children 'promiscuously' endorse teleological answers to 'why' questions-a tendency linked to arguments that humans are intuitively theistic and naturally unscientific. But how do people arrive at an endorsement of a teleological answer? Here, we show that the endorsement of teleological answers need not imply unscientific reasoning (n=880). A series of experiments shows that (a) 'why' questions can be understood as a query for one of two distinct kinds of information, and (b) these 'implicit questions' can explain adults' answer preferences without appeal to unscientific worldviews. As a strong test of this view, we show that people endorse teleological answers that can answer relevant (implicit) questions about something's purpose, even when those answers are explicitly non-causal. Thus, we argue that endorsement of teleological answers does not necessarily equate to endorsement of teleological 'explanations': Instead, explanation preferences may simply be an indication of people's pragmatic expectations about the questions that others ask. This view reframes how we should think about explanation preferences in general, while also offering practical insight into the pragmatics of question-asking.

A Right Way to Explain? Function, Mechanism, and the Order of Explanations

“…Prior studies have considered people's preferences for functional vs mechanistic explanations (e,g. Kelemen, 1999;Kelemen et al, 2013;Trouche et al, 2018;Chuey et al, 2020;Joo, Yousif, & Keil, 2021). In contrast, the current studies do not ask participants to favor one element over the other, but rather to consider how these two elements work together to constitute an explanation.…”

“…Prior studies suggest that childrenand even adults under cognitive loadendorse teleological explanations, often over mechanistic explanations (Joo, Yousif, & Keil, 2021;Kelemen, 1999). Studies 1a and 1b provide evidence that this preference for function might be due to a sensitivity to order.…”

“…Scientific phenomena can be explained at multiple levels (Craver, 2015). As a given phenomenon can be appropriately explained by appealing either to mechanism or to function (Joo, Yousif, & Keil, 2021;Lombrozo & Wilkenfeld, 2019), the existence of embedded levels of mechanism suggests the presence of levels of functions as well. For example, one might explain the function of an artifact as a whole (e.g.…”

Are we Teleologically Essentialist?

“…Something's telos may not be its essence per se , but learning about something's telos (or a change to it) may nevertheless be highly informative. We know that teleological thinking plays an important role in many different areas of cognition—influencing judgments of category membership (Lombrozo & Rehder, 2012; Matan & Carey, 2001), persistence (Rose, 2014), mereology (Rose & Schaffer, 2017), and explanation (Joo et al, 2022; Kelemen, 1999; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Kelemen et al, 2013). One way to understand this influence is to something's purpose as a simple, but particularly useful, cue to many complex properties.…”

Motive on the mind: Explanatory preferences at multiple stages of the legal-investigative process

“…your answer to the above questions is: "Why?" When we ask why questions, there are multiple kinds of information we could be seeking (Joo, Yousif & Keil, 2021). One kind of answer to this question could appeal to the purpose and function of the crime, akin to a teleological explanation.…”