Explanation classification depends on understanding: extending the epistemic side-effect effect
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Explanation classification depends on understanding: extending the epistemic side-effect effect Daniel A. Wilkenfeld1 · Tania Lombrozo2
Received: 25 December 2017 / Accepted: 26 May 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Our goal in this paper is to experimentally investigate whether folk conceptions of explanation are psychologistic. In particular, are people more likely to classify speech acts as explanations when they cause understanding in their recipient? The empirical evidence that we present suggests this is so. Using the side-effect effect as a marker of mental state ascriptions, we argue that lay judgments of explanatory status are mediated by judgments of a speaker’s and/or audience’s mental states. First, we show that attributions of both understanding and explanation exhibit a side-effect effect. Next, we show that when the speaker’s and audience’s level of understanding is stipulated, the explanation side-effect effect goes away entirely. These results not only extend the side-effect effect to attributions of understanding, they also suggest that attributions of explanation exhibit a side-effect effect because they depend upon attributions of understanding, supporting the idea that folk conceptions of explanation are psychologistic. Keywords Explanation · Understanding · Side-effect effect · Psychologism
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Daniel A. Wilkenfeld [email protected] Tania Lombrozo [email protected]
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Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
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Department of Psychology, University of Califonria, Berkeley, Berkeley, USA
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Synthese
1 Introduction 1.1 Explanation and understanding Explanation and understanding often go hand in hand. Explanations can generate understanding, and, on some views, understanding consists in knowledge or grasp of explanations (e.g., Strevens 2013, Khalifa 2017). But is understanding essential to explanation? Or is it merely a common and desirable consequence, a symptom of explanations? On the one hand, philosophers of science for many years took it as a datum that there could be explanations without understanding, and the intuition is compelling—clearly there can be explanations of phenomena so complex or cosmic in scope that it beggars belief to suppose the human mind could ever grasp them. Hempel and Oppenheim (1948, p. 17), in particular, argued against ‘psychologistic’ approaches to explanation based on the following dilemma: either understanding is objective or subjective. Subjective understanding is associated with a ‘feeling of empathic familiarity’ (ibid.), and so on this horn a requirement that explanations engender understanding is odious (at least to a positivist philosopher of science). Objective understanding is just what one has when one knows a D-N explanation, and so on this horn a requirement that explanation engender understanding is superfluous. (For a discussion of this dilemma and what it leaves out, see Wilkenfeld 2014). On the other hand, alternative strands of philosoph
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