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Explanation as orgasm

Minds and Machines 8 (1):101-118 (1998)

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  1. The seductions of clarity.C. Thi Nguyen - 2021 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 89:227-255.
    The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they (...)
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  • Emergence of scientific understanding in real-time ecological research practice.Luana Poliseli - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (4):1-25.
    Scientific understanding as a subject of inquiry has become widely discussed in philosophy of science and is often addressed through case studies from history of science. Even though these historical reconstructions engage with details of scientific practice, they usually provide only limited information about the gradual formation of understanding in ongoing processes of model and theory construction. Based on a qualitative ethnographic study of an ecological research project, this article shifts attention from understanding in the context of historical case studies (...)
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  • Does IBE Require a ‘Model’ of Explanation?Frank Cabrera - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (2):727-750.
    In this article, I consider an important challenge to the popular theory of scientific inference commonly known as ‘inference to the best explanation’, one that has received scant attention.1 1 The problem is that there exists a wide array of rival models of explanation, thus leaving IBE objectionably indeterminate. First, I briefly introduce IBE. Then, I motivate the problem and offer three potential solutions, the most plausible of which is to adopt a kind of pluralism about the rival models of (...)
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  • Současné vědecké poznatky o vnímání: voda na mlýn pragmatismu?Jaroslav Peregrin - 2013 - Teorie Vědy / Theory of Science 35 (3):431-442.
    Nedávné vědecké poznatky týkající se lidského vnímání a lidského konání naznačují, že nejenom není konání bez vnímání, ale že není ani vnímání bez konání. Zcela se mění pohled na to, jak lidé vnímají ; a objevují se dokonce i extrémní názory, že vnímání a konání jsou vlastně jednou a toutéž věcí. Podobně se v důsledku zkoumání motivačních struktur stojících v základu tvorby teorií rozmývá ostrou hranici mezi teorií a praxí. Zdá se mi, že tohle všechno je poněkud překvapivá voda na (...)
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  • “I Want to Know More!”: Children Are Sensitive to Explanation Quality When Exploring New Information.Candice M. Mills, Kaitlin R. Sands, Sydney P. Rowles & Ian L. Campbell - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (1):e12706.
    When someone encounters an explanation perceived as weak, this may lead to a feeling of deprivation or tension that can be resolved by engaging in additional learning. This study examined to what extent children respond to weak explanations by seeking additional learning opportunities. Seven‐ to ten‐year‐olds (N = 81) explored questions and explanations (circular or mechanistic) about 12 animals using a novel Android tablet application. After rating the quality of an initial explanation, children could request and receive additional information or (...)
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  • The cultural evolution of shamanism.Manvir Singh - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41:e66.
    Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose a cultural evolutionary theory to explain why shamanism consistently develops and, in particular, (1) why shamanic traditions exhibit recurrent features around the (...)
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  • Fitting Feelings and Elegant Proofs: On the Psychology of Aesthetic Evaluation in Mathematics.Cain Todd - 2017 - Philosophia Mathematica:nkx007.
    ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of aesthetic judgements in mathematics by focussing on the relationship between the epistemic and aesthetic criteria employed in such judgements, and on the nature of the psychological experiences underpinning them. I claim that aesthetic judgements in mathematics are plausibly understood as expressions of what I will call ‘aesthetic-epistemic feelings’ that serve a genuine cognitive and epistemic function. I will then propose a naturalistic account of these feelings in terms of sub-personal processes of representing and (...)
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  • The Role of Consciousness in Grasping and Understanding.David Bourget - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (2):285-318.
    One sometimes believes a proposition without grasping it. For example, a complete achromat might believe that ripe tomatoes are red without grasping this proposition. My aim in this paper is to shed light on the difference between merely believing a proposition and grasping it. I focus on two possible theories of grasping: the inferential theory, which explains grasping in terms of inferential role, and the phenomenal theory, which explains grasping in terms of phenomenal consciousness. I argue that the phenomenal theory (...)
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  • Epistemic Feelings and Epistemic Emotions (Focus Section).Santiago Arango-Muñoz & Kourken Michaelian - 2014 - Philosophical Inquiries.
    Philosophers of mind and epistemologists are increasingly making room in their theories for epistemic emotions (E-emotions) and, drawing on metacognition research in psychology, epistemic – or noetic or metacognitive – feelings (E-feelings). Since philoso- phers have only recently begun to draw on empirical research on E-feelings, in particular, we begin by providing a general characterization of E-feelings (section 1) and reviewing some highlights of relevant research (section 2). We then turn to philosophical work on E-feelings and E-emotions, situating the contributions (...)
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  • Brain-Inspired Conscious Computing Architecture.Wlodzislaw Duch - 2005 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 26 (1-2):1-22.
    What type of artificial systems will claim to be conscious and will claim to experience qualia? The ability to comment upon physical states of a brain-like dynamical system coupled with its environment seems to be sufficient to make claims. The flow of internal states in such systems, guided and limited by associative memory, is similar to the stream of consciousness. A specific architecture of an artificial system, termed articon, is introduced that by its very design has to claim being conscious. (...)
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  • Wisdom.Stephen R. Grimm - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1):1-16.
    What is it that makes someone wise, or one person wiser than another? I argue that wisdom consists in knowledge of how to live well, and that this knowledge of how to live well is constituted by various further kinds of knowledge. One concern for this view is that knowledge is not needed for wisdom but rather some state short of knowledge, such as having rational or justified beliefs about various topics. Another concern is that the emphasis on knowing how (...)
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  • Building theory-based concepts: Four-year-olds preferentially seek explanations for features of kinds.Andrei Cimpian & Gina Petro - 2014 - Cognition 131 (2):300-310.
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  • (1 other version)Knowledge, Practical Interests, and Rising Tides.Stephen R. Grimm - 2015 - In John Greco & David Henderson (eds.), Epistemic Evaluation: Point and Purpose in Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
    Defenders of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology (or what I call practicalism) need to address two main problems. First, the view seems to imply, absurdly, that knowledge can come and go quite easily—in particular, that it might come and go along with our variable practical interests. We can call this the stability problem. Second, there seems to be no fully satisfying way of explaining whose practical interests matter. We can call this the “whose stakes?” problem. I argue that both problems can (...)
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  • Pragmatic experimental philosophy.Justin C. Fisher - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (3):412-433.
    This paper considers three package deals combining views in philosophy of mind, meta-philosophy, and experimental philosophy. The most familiar of these packages gives center-stage to pumping intuitions about fanciful cases, but that package involves problematic commitments both to a controversial descriptivist theory of reference and to intuitions that “negative” experimental philosophers have shown to be suspiciously variable and context-sensitive. In light of these difficulties, it would be good for future-minded experimental philosophers to align themselves with a different package deal. This (...)
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  • (1 other version)Folk theory of mind: Conceptual foundations of social cognition.Bertram F. Malle - 2003 - In [Book Chapter] (in Press). pp. 225-255.
    The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior to any particular conscious (...)
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  • Scientific explanation and the sense of understanding.J. D. Trout - 2002 - Philosophy of Science 69 (2):212-233.
    Scientists and laypeople alike use the sense of understanding that an explanation conveys as a cue to good or correct explanation. Although the occurrence of this sense or feeling of understanding is neither necessary nor sufficient for good explanation, it does drive judgments of the plausibility and, ultimately, the acceptability, of an explanation. This paper presents evidence that the sense of understanding is in part the routine consequence of two well-documented biases in cognitive psychology: overconfidence and hindsight. In light of (...)
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  • The Folk Probably Don’t Think What You Think They Think: Experiments on Causation by Absence.Jonathan Livengood & Edouard Machery - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):107–127.
    Folk theories—untutored people’s (often implicit) theories about various features of the world—have been fashionable objects of inquiry in psychology for almost two decades now (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994), and more recently they have been of interest in experimental philosophy (Nichols 2004). Folk theories of psy- chology, physics, biology, and ethics have all come under investigation. Folk meta- physics, however, has not been as extensively studied. That so little is known about folk metaphysics is unfortunate for (at least) two reasons. (...)
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  • (1 other version)The shadows and shallows of explanation.Robert A. Wilson & Frank Keil - 1998 - Minds and Machines 8 (1):137-159.
    We introduce two notions–the shadows and the shallows of explanation–in opening up explanation to broader, interdisciplinary investigation. The shadows of explanation refer to past philosophical efforts to provide either a conceptual analysis of explanation or in some other way to pinpoint the essence of explanation. The shallows of explanation refer to the phenomenon of having surprisingly limited everyday, individual cognitive abilities when it comes to explanation. Explanations are ubiquitous, but they typically are not accompanied by the depth that we might, (...)
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  • The emulation theory of representation: Motor control, imagery, and perception.Rick Grush - 2004 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (3):377-396.
    The emulation theory of representation is developed and explored as a framework that can revealingly synthesize a wide variety of representational functions of the brain. The framework is based on constructs from control theory (forward models) and signal processing (Kalman filters). The idea is that in addition to simply engaging with the body and environment, the brain constructs neural circuits that act as models of the body and environment. During overt sensorimotor engagement, these models are driven by efference copies in (...)
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  • Scientific Theories and Philosophical Stances: Themes from van Fraassen.Claus Beisbart & Michael Frauchiger (eds.) - 2024 - De Gruyter.
    Since the publication of his seminal monograph "The scientific image", Bas van Fraassen is a key figure in philosophy of science. In this book, other philosophers with various outlooks critically discuss his work on theories, empiricism and philosophical stances. The book starts with a new article by van Fraassen on his preferred account of theories, the so-called semantic view. This account is now 50 years old, and van Fraassen takes this anniversary as an opportunity to review the account, its history (...)
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  • A Phenomenal Theory of Grasping and Understanding.David Bourget - 2025 - In Andrei Ionuț Mărăşoiu & Mircea Dumitru (eds.), Understanding and conscious experience: philosophical and scientific perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.
    There is a difference between merely thinking that P and really grasping that P. For example, Jackson's (1982) black-and-white Mary cannot (before leaving her black-and-white room) fully grasp what it means to say that fire engines are red, but she can perfectly well entertain the thought that fire engines are red. The contrast between merely thinking and grasping is especially salient in the context of certain moral decisions. For example, an individual who grasps the plight of starving children thanks to (...)
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  • No brute facts: The Principle of Sufficient Reason in ordinary thought.Scott Partington, Alejandro Vesga & Shaun Nichols - 2023 - Cognition 238 (C):105479.
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  • Breaking boundaries: The Bayesian Brain Hypothesis for perception and prediction.Inês Hipólito & Michael Kirchhoff - 2023 - Consciousness and Cognition 111 (C):103510.
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  • Hostile Epistemology.C. Thi Nguyen - 2023 - Social Philosophy Today 39:9-32.
    Hostile epistemology is the study of how environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in those vulnerabilities arise from the basic character of our epistemic lives. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources, perpetually forced to reasoning a rush. I focus on two sources of unavoidable vulnerability. First, we need to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to manage our limited time and attention. But hostile forces can always game the gap between the heuristic and the ideal. (...)
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  • All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Religious: Supernatural Explanations as Abstract and Useful Falsehoods about Complex Realities.Aaron D. Lightner & Edward H. Hagen - 2022 - Human Nature 33 (4):425-462.
    Many cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion argue that supernatural explanations are byproducts of our cognitive adaptations. An influential argument states that our supernatural explanations result from a tendency to generate anthropomorphic explanations, and that this tendency is a byproduct of an error management strategy because agents tend to be associated with especially high fitness costs. We propose instead that anthropomorphic and other supernatural explanations result as features of a broader toolkit of well-designed cognitive adaptations, which are designed for explaining (...)
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  • AI, Opacity, and Personal Autonomy.Bram Vaassen - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (4):1-20.
    Advancements in machine learning have fuelled the popularity of using AI decision algorithms in procedures such as bail hearings, medical diagnoses and recruitment. Academic articles, policy texts, and popularizing books alike warn that such algorithms tend to be opaque: they do not provide explanations for their outcomes. Building on a causal account of transparency and opacity as well as recent work on the value of causal explanation, I formulate a moral concern for opaque algorithms that is yet to receive a (...)
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  • Inference to the Best Explanation - An Overview.Frank Cabrera - 2023 - In Lorenzo Magnani (ed.), Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer. pp. 1-34.
    In this article, I will provide a critical overview of the form of non-deductive reasoning commonly known as “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE). Roughly speaking, according to IBE, we ought to infer the hypothesis that provides the best explanation of our evidence. In section 2, I survey some contemporary formulations of IBE and highlight some of its putative applications. In section 3, I distinguish IBE from C.S. Peirce’s notion of abduction. After underlining some of the essential elements of IBE, (...)
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  • Integrating Philosophy of Understanding with the Cognitive Sciences.Kareem Khalifa, Farhan Islam, J. P. Gamboa, Daniel Wilkenfeld & Daniel Kostić - 2022 - Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 16.
    We provide two programmatic frameworks for integrating philosophical research on understanding with complementary work in computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. First, philosophical theories of understanding have consequences about how agents should reason if they are to understand that can then be evaluated empirically by their concordance with findings in scientific studies of reasoning. Second, these studies use a multitude of explanations, and a philosophical theory of understanding is well suited to integrating these explanations in illuminating ways.
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  • Whewell’s hylomorphism as a metaphorical explanation for how mind and world merge.Ragnar van der Merwe - 2023 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (1):19-38.
    William Whewell’s 19th century philosophy of science is sometimes glossed over as a footnote to Kant. There is however a key feature of Whewell’s account worth noting. This is his appeal to Aristotle’s form/matter hylomorphism as a metaphor to explain how mind and world merge in successful scientific inquiry. Whewell’s hylomorphism suggests a middle way between rationalism and empiricism reminiscent of experience pragmatists like Steven Levine’s view that mind and world are entwined in experience. I argue however that Levine does (...)
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  • Violations of expectation trigger infants to search for explanations.Jasmin Perez & Lisa Feigenson - 2022 - Cognition 218 (C):104942.
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  • The Automated Laplacean Demon: How ML Challenges Our Views on Prediction and Explanation.Sanja Srećković, Andrea Berber & Nenad Filipović - 2021 - Minds and Machines 32 (1):159-183.
    Certain characteristics make machine learning a powerful tool for processing large amounts of data, and also particularly unsuitable for explanatory purposes. There are worries that its increasing use in science may sideline the explanatory goals of research. We analyze the key characteristics of ML that might have implications for the future directions in scientific research: epistemic opacity and the ‘theory-agnostic’ modeling. These characteristics are further analyzed in a comparison of ML with the traditional statistical methods, in order to demonstrate what (...)
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  • Language shapes children’s attitudes: Consequences of internal, behavioral, and societal information in punitive and nonpunitive contexts.James P. Dunlea & Larisa Heiphetz - 2022 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 151 (6):1233-1251.
    Research has probed the consequences of providing people with different types of information regarding why a person possesses a certain characteristic. However, this work has largely examined the consequences of different information subsets (e.g., information focusing on internal versus societal causes). Less work has compared several types of information within the same paradigm. Using the legal system as an example domain, we provided children (N=198 6- to 8-year-olds) with several types of information—including information highlighting internal moral character, internal biological factors, (...)
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  • Interest, Disfluency, and Underlying Values: a Better Theory of Aesthetic Pleasure.Heather V. Adair - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):779-795.
    Over the last few decades, empirical researchers have become increasingly interested in explaining the formation of “basic” aesthetic judgments, i.e. simple judgments of sensory preferability and the pleasure that seems to accompany them. To that end, Reber et al. have recently defended a “processing-fluency” view, which identifies aesthetic pleasure with one’s ability to easily process an object’s perceptual properties (e.g. Reber 2012 ). While the processing-fluency theory is certainly an improvement over its competitors, it is currently vulnerable to several serious (...)
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  • Charlie Kurth, The Anxious Mind: An Investigation into the Varieties and Virtues of Anxiety. [REVIEW]Daniel Kelly - 2021 - Ethics 132 (1):249-255.
    Kurth wants us to understand and appreciate our anxiety more than we typically do. His concise and crisply written monograph makes a good case that we should. It deepens our understanding of what anxiety is, and of how it animates different facets of our mental and moral lives. The case he builds that, roughly, anxiety is one of the brain’s ways of affectively signaling and responding to uncertainty is clearly argued and meticulously organized. Kurth hits the targets he sets for (...)
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  • The Mark of Understanding: In Defense of an Ability Account.Sven Delarivière & Bart Van Kerkhove - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (5):619-648.
    Understanding is a valued trait in any epistemic practice, scientific or not. Yet, when it comes to characterizing its nature, the notion has not received the philosophical attention it deserves. We have set ourselves three tasks in this paper. First, we defend the importance of this endeavor. Second, we consider and criticize a number of proposals to this effect. Third, we defend an alternative account, focusing on abilities as the proper mark of understanding.
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  • Comic Impossibilities.Jason Leddington - 2020 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (4):547-558.
    Argues for the controversial and initially counterintuitive thesis that theatrical magic (that is, the performance of conjuring tricks) is a form of standup comedy.
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  • Developmental Changes in the Use of Supernatural Explanations for Unusual Events.Jacqueline D. Woolley, Chelsea A. Cornelius & Walter Lacy - 2011 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (3-4):311-337.
    The focus of this research is to explore the developmental trajectory of the propensity to see meaning in unexpected or chance events, and more specifically, to explore the origin and development of nonmaterial or supernatural explanations. Sixty-seven children aged 8, 10 and 12, along with 22 adults, were presented with scenarios describing unusual or unexpected events. They were first asked to provide explanations for why they thought the events occurred and then asked to rate different supernatural explanations as they pertained (...)
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  • Understanding, Problem-Solving, and Conscious Reflection.Andrei Mărăşoiu - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (1):71-81.
    According to Zagzebski, understanding something is justified by the exercise of cognitive skills and intellectual virtues the knower possesses. Zagzebski develops her view by suggesting that “understanding has internalist conditions for success”. Against this view, Grimm raises an objection: what justifies understanding is the reliability of the processes by which we come to understand, and we need not be aware of the outcome of all reliable processes. Understanding is no exception, so, given that understanding something results from reliable processes, we (...)
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  • Explanation and the Nature of Scientific Knowledge.Kevin McCain - 2015 - Science & Education 24 (7-8):827-854.
    Explaining phenomena is a primary goal of science. Consequently, it is unsurprising that gaining a proper understanding of the nature of explanation is an important goal of science education. In order to properly understand explanation, however, it is not enough to simply consider theories of the nature of explanation. Properly understanding explanation requires grasping the relation between explanation and understanding, as well as how explanations can lead to scientific knowledge. This article examines the nature of explanation, its relation to understanding, (...)
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  • Nullius in Explanans: an ethical risk assessment for explainable AI.Luca Nannini, Diletta Huyskes, Enrico Panai, Giada Pistilli & Alessio Tartaro - 2025 - Ethics and Information Technology 27 (1):1-28.
    Explanations are conceived to ensure the trustworthiness of AI systems. Yet, relying solemnly on algorithmic solutions, as provided by explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), might fall short to account for sociotechnical risks jeopardizing their factuality and informativeness. To mitigate these risks, we delve into the complex landscape of ethical risks surrounding XAI systems and their generated explanations. By employing a literature review combined with rigorous thematic analysis, we uncover a diverse array of technical risks tied to the robustness, fairness, and evaluation (...)
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  • The Theory Theory Thrice Over: The Child as Scientist, Superscientist or Social Institution?Michael A. Bishop & Stephen M. Downes - 2002 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 33 (1):117-132.
    Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff have argued for a view they call the ‘theory theory’: theory change in science and children are similar. While their version of the theory theory has been criticized for depending on a number of disputed claims, we argue that there is a fundamental problem which is much more basic: the theory theory is multiply ambiguous. We show that it might be claiming that a similarity holds between theory change in children and (i) individual scientists, (ii) (...)
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  • Explanationist evidentialism.Kevin McCain - 2013 - Episteme 10 (3):299-315.
    In their most recent co-authored work, Conee and Feldman (2008) suggest that epistemic support should be understood in terms of best explanations. Although this suggestion is plausible, Conee and Feldman admit that they have not provided the necessary details for a complete account of epistemic support. This article offers an explanationist account of epistemic support of the kind that Conee and Feldman suggest. It is argued that this account of epistemic support yields the intuitively correct results in a wide variety (...)
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  • Understanding, explanation, and unification.Victor Gijsbers - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (3):516-522.
    In this article I argue that there are two different types of understanding: the understanding we get from explanations, and the understanding we get from unification. This claim is defended by first showing that explanation and unification are not as closely related as has sometimes been thought. A critical appraisal of recent proposals for understanding without explanation leads us to discuss the example of a purely classificatory biology: it turns out that such a science can give us understanding of the (...)
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  • The Value of Understanding.Stephen Grimm - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (2):103-117.
    Over the last several years a number of leading philosophers – including Catherine Elgin, Linda Zagzebski, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Duncan Pritchard – have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the contemporary focus on knowledge in epistemology and have attempted to “recover” the notion of understanding. According to some of these philosophers, in fact, understanding deserves not just to be recovered, but to supplant knowledge as the focus of epistemological inquiry. This entry considers some of the main reasons why philosophers have taken understanding (...)
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  • Cognitive individualism and the child as scientist program.Bill Wringe - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (4):518-529.
    n this paper, I examine the charge that Gopnik and Meltzoff’s ‘Child as Scientist’ program, outlined and defended in their 1997 book Words, Thoughts and Theories is vitiated by a form of ‘cognitive individualism’ about science. Although this charge has often been leveled at Gopnik and Meltzoff’s work, it has rarely been developed in any detail. -/- I suggest that we should distinguish between two forms of cognitive individualism which I refer to as ‘ontic’ and ‘epistemic’ cognitive individualism (OCI and (...)
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  • The psychology of scientific explanation.J. D. Trout - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (3):564–591.
    Philosophers agree that scientific explanations aim to produce understanding, and that good ones succeed in this aim. But few seriously consider what understanding is, or what the cues are when we have it. If it is a psychological state or process, describing its specific nature is the job of psychological theorizing. This article examines the role of understanding in scientific explanation. It warns that the seductive, phenomenological sense of understanding is often, but mistakenly, viewed as a cue of genuine understanding. (...)
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  • Capturing the conspiracist’s imagination.Daniel Munro - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (12):3353-3381.
    Some incredibly far-fetched conspiracy theories circulate online these days. For most of us, clear evidence would be required before we’d believe these extraordinary theories. Yet, conspiracists often cite evidence that seems transparently very weak. This is puzzling, since conspiracists often aren’t irrational people who are incapable of rationally processing evidence. I argue that existing accounts of conspiracist belief formation don’t fully address this puzzle. Then, drawing on both philosophical and empirical considerations, I propose a new explanation that appeals to the (...)
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  • The ‘niche’ in niche-based theorizing: much ado about nothing.Samantha Wakil & James Justus - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (2):1-21.
    The niche is allegedly the conceptual bedrock underpinning the most prominent, and some would say most important, theorizing in ecology. We argue this point of view is more aspirational than veridical. Rather than critically dissect existing definitions of the concept, the supposedly significant work it is thought to have done in ecology is our evaluative target. There is no denying the impressive mathematical sophistication and theoretical ingenuity of the ecological modeling that invokes ‘niche’ terminology. But despite the pervasive labeling, we (...)
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  • The Shivers of Knowledge.Félix Schoeller - 2015 - Human and Social Studies 4 (3):26-41.
    Aesthetic chills occur in artistic, scientific and religious context. We introduce a theoretical framework relating them to humans’ vital need for cognition. We discuss the implications of such a framework and the plausibility of our hypothesis. Numerous references to chills are introduced.
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  • Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) Versus Explaining for the Best Inference.Tania Lombrozo & Daniel Wilkenfeld - 2015 - Science & Education 24 (9-10):1059-1077.
    In pedagogical contexts and in everyday life, we often come to believe something because it would best explain the data. What is it about the explanatory endeavor that makes it essential to everyday learning and to scientific progress? There are at least two plausible answers. On one view, there is something special about having true explanations. This view is highly intuitive: it’s clear why true explanations might improve one’s epistemic position. However, there is another possibility—it could be that the process (...)
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