Are Humans Intuitive Philosophers?

Abstract

What are the criteria that people use to evaluate everyday explanations? This chapter focuses on simplicity, coherence, and unification. It considers various operationalizations of each construct within the context of explanations to measure how people respond to them. With regard to simplicity, some of the psychological literature suggests that people do have a preference for simple explanations that have few causes, but the authors find that a more complete assessment shows that this preference is moderated by a number of factors when evaluating everyday explanations. For one, people prefer explanations that elaborate on causal mechanisms and provide a greater sense of understanding, even if this increases complexity. Measures of coherence are highly predictive of explanation quality. Moreover, people prefer explanations that cohere with the evidence. But the meaning of coherence remains mysterious; it seems to be a placeholder for a complex system of evaluation. There is surprisingly little evidence that people value unification in the form of abstract explanation. Indeed, people often respond positively to extraneous detail. Detail may enhance our understanding of particular events and might help us better visualize mechanisms. The authors also find that people prefer explanations that use words entrenched in a community even if the explanation offers no real information. The authors conclude that people are not merely intuitive philosophers. How a person evaluates an explanation depends on what that person is trying to achieve.

Revisiting the Narrow Latent Scope Bias in Explanatory Reasoning

“…One of their findings was that scenario wording influenced participants' assumptions about the conditional independence of the effects predicted by competing explanations, and thus the direction of explanatory simplicity effects. Similarly, work by Zemla and colleagues (see, e.g., Sloman, Zemla, Lagnado, Bechlivanidis, & Hemmatian, 2019;Zemla et al, 2017Zemla et al, , 2023 may be taken to suggest that the degree to which reasoners adhere to different explanatory virtues (e.g., simplicity or abstractness) also may depend on the pragmatic "purpose" (Sloman et al, 2019, p. 14) an explanation is assumed to have; they contrast the example of a policymaker who might favor more abstract and generalizable explanations with one of a private investigator who might demand as much detail about a case as possible). Future work may continue looking into this.…”

The cognitive science of COVID-19: Acceptance, denial, and belief change

“…Philosophy contributes ideas about inference to the best explanation, coherence, and objectivity. Psychology contributes empirical studies that provide evidence that people do think in accord with standards of coherence [29] , [30] , [31] . Computer modeling is essential for determining that the proposed mechanism of satisfying multiple constraints is feasible and generates results that correspond to human behavior, in this case how many scientists concluded that the claim that wearing masks prevents disease is acceptable.…”

How Do We Believe?

“…Later, I started examining one of the key roles of causal models: explanation. Much to my surprise, my colleagues and I found that one of the most common assumptions in this field—that people prefer simple explanations over more complex ones—may not be correct in general (Sloman et al., 2019). People like explanations that overdetermine what they are trying to explain; they like the object of their explanation to seem inevitable.…”