The Psychology of Explanation

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Looking for a good explanation is about finding a pattern that fits into the rest of our knowledge of the world. And I think that it helps explain why merely predicting something accurately doesn't give us a sense of understanding and explanatory satisfaction. The best we can do is to rely on our deep learning system or extremely complicated theory to do the predicting for us.

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.