What makes a good explanation? This question has generated an enormous literature in philosophy of science, but has received considerably less attention from empirical cognitive scientists. In this collaborative project, we investigate people's everyday intuitions about the factors that make for a good explanation. As a starting point, we are considering explanations that appeal to category membership. For example, if one asks "Why does mercury conduct electricity?", a reasonable explanation might be that it's a metal, and all metals conduct electricity. We call such explanations category-based explanations because they account for a property by subsuming the member under a category with the given property. While no one has studied category-based explanation in detail, there is a large literature within cognitive psychology on category based induction. We are investigating whether the same properties that shape people's judgments of the strength of inductive arguments (e.g. highly similar premise and conclusion categories) also apply to their judgements about explanation. In addition to illuminating the relationship between explanations and arguments, a topic with a long history in philosophy of science, we hope to understand the role of generality in explanation. While arguments that appeal to more general categories seem to be logically weaker, we predict that explanations that appeal to more general categories should be stronger. Pilot experiments confirm this prediction, and we are currently studying the role of generality in category-based explanations more systematically.

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Michael Weisberg
Tania Lombrozo