Did the Primates Do That Also?

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The way people have sort of thought about this for infants is by looking at what infants look at, right? Because that's a behavior that we can measure. So the fact that they discriminate those two cases and how long they look tells us something about what their expectations are about the way the world works. Now, does it tell us what they're explaining? This is now much more controversial. But at least some of the people who do this research have suggested that part of what's going on when infants observe these cases is that they try to construct an explanation for what they observed.

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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