Explanation and cognition / edited by Frank C. Keil and Robert A. Wilson.

"A Bradford book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Explaining explanation / Frank C. Keil and Robert A. Wilson -- Discovering explanations / Herbert A. Simon -- The naturalness of religion and the unnaturalness of science / Robert N. McCauley -- The shadows and shallows of explanation / Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil -- "How does it work?" versus "What are the laws?": two conceptions of psychological explanation / Robert Cummins -- Twisted tales: causal complexity and cognitive scientific explanation / Andy Clark -- Bayes nets as psychological models / Clark Glymour -- The role of mechanism beliefs in causal reasoning / Woo-kyoung Ahn and Charles W. Kalish -- Causality in the mind: estimating contextual and conjunctive power / Patricia W. Cheng -- Explaining disease: correlations, causes, and mechanisms / Paul Thagard -- Explantion in scientists and children / William F. Brewer, Clark A. Chinn, and Ala Samarapungavan -- Explanation as orgasm and the drive for causal knowledge: the function, evolution, and phenomenology of the theory formation system / Alison Gopnik -- Explanatory knowledge and conceptual combination / Christine Johnson and Frank Keil -- Explanatory concepts / Gregory L. Murphy.

Print version record.

English.

These essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual change in adults, and reasoning in human and artificial systems.Explanations seem to be a large and natural part of our cognitive lives. As Frank Keil and Robert Wilson write, "When a cognitive activity is so ubiquitous that it is expressed both in a preschooler's idle questions and in work that is the culmination of decades of scholarly effort, one has to ask whether we really have one and the same phenomenon or merely different cognitively based phenomena that are loosely, or even metaphorically, related."This book is unusual in its interdisciplinary approach to that ubiquitous activity. The essays address five basic questions about explanation: How do explanatory capacities develop? Are there kinds of explanation? Do explanations correspond to domains of knowledge? Why do we seek explanations, and what do they accomplish? How central are causes to explanation? The essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual change in adults, and reasoning in human and artificial systems. They also introduce emerging perspectives on explanation from computer science, linguistics, and anthropology.ContributorsWoo-kyoung Ahn, William F. Brewer, Patricia W. Cheng, Clark A. Chinn, Andy Clark, Robert Cummins, Clark Glymour, Alison Gopnik, Christine Johnson, Charles W. Kalish, Frank C. Keil, Robert N. McCauley, Gregory L. Murphy, Ala Samarapungavan, Herbert A. Simon, Paul Thagard, Robert A. Wilson

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