Is There Something Going On?

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The world is a weird mixture of simple and complex, right? And we have to work hard to find the simplicity. I think there might be two things going on. We care about the backwards-looking part because we want to hold people causally or morally responsible. So that's important. But also the practice of explaining why particular events occurred is going to be what allows us to construct a causal model of that domain. Then it's the theory of that domain that will allow us to predictions in the future.

There are few human impulses more primal than the desire for explanations. We have expectations concerning what happens, and when what we experience differs from those expectations, we want to know the reason why. There are obvious philosophy questions here: What is an explanation? Do explanations bottom out, or go forever? But there are also psychology questions: What precisely is it that we seek when we demand an explanation? What makes us satisfied with one? Tania Lombrozo is a psychologist who is also conversant with the philosophical side of things. She offers some pretty convincing explanations for why we value explanation so highly.

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Tania Lombrozo received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of psychology at Princeton. Among her awards are the Gittier Award from the American Psychological Foundation, an Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

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