Explanation and Cognition

Voorkant
Frank C. Keil, Robert Andrew Wilson
MIT Press, 2000 - 396 pagina's

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.

Contributors
Woo-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

Vanuit het boek

Inhoudsopgave

Estimating Contextual
15
Discovering Explanations
21
The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness
61
The Shadows and Shallows of Explanation
87
Causal Complexity and Cognitive
145
Bayes Nets as Psychological Models
169
The Role of Mechanism Beliefs in Causal Reasoning
199
Conjunctive Power
227
Correlations Causes
255
Explanation in Scientists and Children
279
Explanation as Orgasm and the Drive for Causal
299
Explanatory Knowledge and Conceptual Combination
327
Explanatory Concepts
361
Index
393
Copyright

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Over de auteur (2000)

Frank C. Keil is Professor of Psychology at Yale University. Robert A. Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at La Trobe University, the author of Genes and the Agents of Life, and coeditor of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences and of E xplanation and Cognition (MIT Press). He directed the project that built EugenicsArchive.ca and is a director and the executive producer of the documentary Surviving Eugenics.

Bibliografische gegevens