AI Article Synopsis
- The study of explanation provides valuable insights into high-level thought, revealing different types of explanations based on causation, content, and cognitive effects.
- Despite often being incomplete and having gaps, people possess basic explanatory frameworks that help them understand the world around them and seek out additional knowledge from others.
- Cultural and developmental variations influence the preferred types of explanations, but most groups can access a range of explanatory schemes.
Article Abstract
The study of explanation, while related to intuitive theories, concepts, and mental models, offers important new perspectives on high-level thought. Explanations sort themselves into several distinct types corresponding to patterns of causation, content domains, and explanatory stances, all of which have cognitive consequences. Although explanations are necessarily incomplete--often dramatically so in laypeople--those gaps are difficult to discern. Despite such gaps and the failure to recognize them fully, people do have skeletal explanatory senses, often implicit, of the causal structure of the world. They further leverage those skeletal understandings by knowing how to access additional explanatory knowledge in other minds and by being particularly adept at using situational support to build explanations on the fly in real time. Across development and cultures, there are differences in preferred explanatory schemes, but rarely are any kinds of schemes completely unavailable to a group.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3034737 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190100 | DOI Listing |
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