Explanation At Its Best

Ken Taylor
What makes an explanation a good explanation?

Josh Landy
Isn’t the simplest explanation always the best?

Ken Taylor
Why do people often swallow such crazy explanations?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program

Ken Taylor
that questions everything except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy, we’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco continuing

Ken Taylor
conversations that began at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy. And Josh directs the philosophy and literature initiative. Today we’re

Josh Landy
thinking about explanation at its best.

Ken Taylor
So Josh, suppose you have like two competing explanations of the same thing? How do you think we should go about deciding between them?

Josh Landy
I’ll start with a simpler one. I mean, that one’s going to be more likely to be true, right?

Ken Taylor
Well, maybe, but sometimes a simple explanation can be too simple. Catherine?

Josh Landy
Yeah. Okay. We shouldn’t make explanations so simple that it can’t account for the fact. But yeah, let’s not make it more complicated than we have to.

Ken Taylor
But then that raises the question of how we strike a balance between two simple on one hand and too complex on the other.

Josh Landy
Yeah, there aren’t any hard and fast rules. It’s it’s more a case by case kind of thing. So you

Ken Taylor
mean you kind of know it when you see a kind of like pornography or something, something

Josh Landy
like that. I mean, not exactly like that. It’s true that there isn’t an algorithm for it, but there is a name for it. It’s called abductive inference.

Ken Taylor
That’s a mouthful. I bet. Most people are familiar with the notion of induction and probably deduction, but abduction.

Josh Landy
Well, it’s also called inference to the best explanation if that.

Ken Taylor
Well, actually, I don’t think that helps at all. How about you give an example instead? Uh, sure.

Josh Landy
Okay. Suppose you’re a detective investigating the murder of Jimmy Socrates. Okay. You’ve got you’ve got two main suspects. Freddy Nietzsche and Tommy Han. Okay, I’m with you as of excellent. Here’s the case against Nietzsche. He and Socrates was spotted having a heated argument shortly before Socrates his death and the police found the murder weapon in the bushes in niches back. Wow, that

Ken Taylor
case sounds pretty damning. So okay. What’s Tommy Hobbs? His story, okay.

Josh Landy
Tell me Hobbs hated Socrates, too. And that night, an eye witness saw a man matching Hobbes’s description running from the scene.

Ken Taylor
So maybe Hobbs is our man eyewitness testimony, you know,

Josh Landy
not so fast can only an hour after the murder, Hobbs was spotted in a restaurant 100 miles away having a quiet intimate dinner with his judge. Okay. Well, this

Ken Taylor
is an interesting case, it seems to me we got ourselves in something of a pickle. We got inconclusive evidence. That’s a board two different hypothesis. i It seems to be the only way we’re going to possibly decide between them. We got to dig for more evidence. We got to go do some detecting. I don’t agree. I

Josh Landy
think we’ve got enough evidence already. I mean, surely it’s clear that Nietzsche did it. Wow. Well, if he didn’t do it, how did the gun get into his? Yeah. And how did Hobbes get so far away so fast? Seeking abductions? Cool. It helps us find the best explanation without a lot of messing it. Oh, gosh.

Ken Taylor
Yes. Look, I’m willing to concede that that may be the simplest explanation, but I don’t know why you think that’s the best explanation, but you got a better idea. Well, yeah, yeah. Try this one out. I mean, okay. Tommy Hobbs. He’s really He’s a really devious guy. He’s like framing nature, knowing that they would come to blows. He arranged for Nietzsche and Socrates to meet where he knew they would be seen. And then after they parked company, Hobbes murdered Socrates and then plants the gun in his backyard. What do you think about that?

Josh Landy
I think you’re missing out a really important detail. With that’s the fact there’s an intimate dinner 100 miles away.

Ken Taylor
Right, right, right. I do I do. Look, look, look look. Hobbs is his his helicopter was parked in a nearby hell aboard. He killed Socrates gets into the chopper drops the gun as he flies over the yard lens, the chopper 100 miles away where a driver is waiting to take him to his dinner date to say a better explanation.

Josh Landy
What are you smoking? Again?

Ken Taylor
I’m not smoking anything. And how can you resist? Have you even bothered to check out teleports in the area for suspicious takeoffs and landings done? No. And I don’t intend to. But then how can you be so confident? You know what the best explanation is? I mean, you’re not even willing to consider every logically possible explanation. That’s like choosing your presidential candidate without hearing the other 22 or in the debate.

Josh Landy
You know, that can that’s the beauty of abductive inference. You don’t have to drive yourself crazy searching for evidence to rule out every conceivable alternative. If an alternative is ad hoc, or, or too complicated helicopters, or it’s inconsistent with what we already know, we can just ignore it.

Ken Taylor
But how do you know Josh, here’s the crucial thing. How do you know which alternatives are worth taking seriously, and which aren’t Mr. Sherlock? Well, that’s

Josh Landy
a long story. Well, you

Ken Taylor
know why? Because you’re abductive infringer inference to the best explanation is just hocus pocus.

Josh Landy
Just magic. No, no, no, that’s something that people do all the time, and that they’re remarkably good at and not just scientists, regular folk like you or me even babies do it.

Ken Taylor
Okay, just look, I’m not completely convinced. I’m willing to listen and learn. And to help us get a better sense of how inference to the best explanation is supposed to work. We send our roving philosophical reporter Holly J. McDade to investigate how to one of the world’s most famous detective uses it to get to the bottom of things she files this report.

Holly McDede
A dense yellow fog swirls for the streets of London. It is here we find our hero Sherlock Holmes, sitting in a cocaine induced haze at 221 B Baker Street,

Speaker 1
I can strongly recommend a 7% solution of cocaine. Would you care to try?

Holly McDede
Holmes is engulfed by melancholy He yearns for mysteries to solve

Speaker 1
my mind. Bell’s stagnation can be problems can make work to be the most abstruse cryptogram the most intricate analysis and I rely proper atmosphere.

Holly McDede
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes back in 1887. Conan Doyle was a scientist and a trained physician and his fictional detective use scientific methods and forensic evidence before the actual police did. Home says simple explanations are sometimes the correct ones.

Unknown Speaker
Every problem is absurdly simple when it is explained.

Holly McDede
But just as often the unlikely explanations can be correct. Often if I

Speaker 2
said to ones who have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Holly McDede
Holmes relies on deductive inductive and abductive reasoning to solve crimes. Deductive reasoning begin to the broad truth that are minor premise and finally a conclusion.

Speaker 3
Certainly there are instances where basically a case is solved by pretty straightforward sort of If This Then That must be true.

Holly McDede
Phil Talon is the CO editor of the philosophy of Sherlock Holmes. He says One example of this is in the home story that adventures are the three students. In this story, a cheater is a foot and is copied answers to an

Speaker 3
exam, the cheater must have been tall enough to look into the window to see that the exam papers were there. Only one of the three students is tall enough and so therefore, this tall student must be the one who did the cheating.

Holly McDede
With inductive reasoning Holmes makes an observation then reaches a conclusion. For example, He can identify 140 different types of cigar based

Speaker 3
on Ash. So he studies pipe ashes and observes that, okay, when something looks like this, then it must have come from here. He kind of moves as it were, from the particular back to the general.

Holly McDede
So he can examine cigarette ash at a crime scene and use this insight into ash to make a guess about how suspects died or who killed who, but there’s more to Holmes method than brains. Tim Weldon is a professor of philosophy and theology at the University of St. Francis.

Speaker 4
What he wanted for him was really this appeal to the heart, or these In summary, evaluative judgments that stem from intuition.

Holly McDede
Holmes uses abductive reasoning IN THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE. That kind of reasoning involves an incomplete observation than a prediction, so it means more intuition is at play. For example, one day around Christmas Holmes examines a dusty hat. He guesses it must belong to an intellectual fellow because of the cubic capacity of the hat. Then he guesses the wear of the hat has lost his wife’s affection.

Speaker 5
So what do we have a gray haired intellectual who three years ago as well to do but has since fallen on hard times, he once had foresight, he now has this. His wife has ceased to love him, and it is doubtful if he has gas laid on in his house.

Holly McDede
When Holmes does identify the thief, he relies on his intuition again, he concludes turning him over to the police would only turn him into a hardened criminal.

Speaker 6
Holmes thought it was the time of year and the disposition of the thief that warranted some kind of letting go or exoneration. You usually don’t see that in any kind of detective fiction.

Holly McDede
That moment may seem compassionate, but Holmes is operating purely out of rational judgment, as he would say to his only friend Watson, I am brain the rest is mere appendix. You won’t find emotion from Sherlock Holmes, but he still has a lot to teach

Unknown Speaker
us. Elementary my dear Watson.

Holly McDede
Philosophy Talk. I’m Holly Jamie deed.

Ken Taylor
That wasn’t Elementary. That was awesome, Holly and a game is afoot. I’m Ken Taylor, with me as my Stanford colleague Josh Landy and today we’re thinking about explanation at its best. We’re joined

Josh Landy
now by Tanya lum Broza professor of psychology at Princeton unit Kirsty and director of the concepts and cognition lab, Tanya, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Unknown Speaker
You It’s a pleasure to be here.

Ken Taylor
So Tanya, you’re a psychologist, I know you have a deep background in philosophy from your Stanford days and beyond. But I wonder what first drew you to this topic? Is it the philosopher in you were the psychologist and you are what?

Speaker 7
Think it’s a bit about I think the psychologist in me was always really interested in explaining why people do the things they do. And then the philosopher and me turn that explanatory impulse on itself and asked, I wonder why I’m so curious about this, right. And one of the things that I found really puzzling, even starting in high school, and especially as an undergraduate was, why do we bother to explain it all? So often, when you try to make sense of things, it’s obvious why it’d be valuable to be able to predict them, or to be able to control them bring something about that’s good or prevent something that’s bad. But when we’re explaining typically, we’re explaining something that already happened, right? You’re you run into a friend who’s angry. And you wonder, Why is this person angry, and it would have been great to prevent it. It’d be great to be able to predict it next time. So you’re prepared. But why do we bother explaining things that already happened? And I think there’s good answers to that puzzle. But that’s really what got me thinking about it. Is it really important psychological and philosophical?

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s a great puzzle. Well, I’m sure we’ll get to that. But before we get to that, let me ask even a more elementary puzzle not to what is an explanation? I mean, it’s it’s such a fascinating topic, but it’s also so complex to tell us if you can add a few words. One explanation is in the first place.

Speaker 7
I would say that it explanations an answer to a why question that generates understanding.

Ken Taylor
That sounds like Aristotle, that is a pithy Yeah, that’s very pithy. I mean, he thought there were different kinds of why questions right. Do you agree with that? I mean, the Aristotelian thought is, yeah, explanations answers, why questions and Judea Pearl has his new autobiography intellectual biography, the question of why Earth? I think it’s called, but but other different kinds of why question. So are the different kinds of explanation?

Speaker 7
I think that’s true. I think there’s lots of different kinds of explanations. I think, one kind of explanation that’s very common is when we try to give a causal story that explains why something came about. So for example, you’re trying to make a cake, and you open the oven, and it didn’t rise at all. And you say, Why didn’t my cake rise? In a case like that? It seems like you’re looking for some sort of a causal story about what went wrong in the causal process that was supposed to lead to a rising, but that’s just one kind of explanation. Aristotle had at least three others. And I think there’s other distinctions we could

Ken Taylor
I mean, when I asked why did you use it? Why did that friend get so angry at me? I’m not looking for I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m not looking for a mechanism, like what turns the gears of his of his or her anger? I’m talking about a reason what, what reason if any, did the person right, and that’s a different kind of explanation, then the Meccan? Or do you think that they’re different guides?

Speaker 7
I think it’s I think they are psychologically different. I think there’s a further question of what their relationship is between them. But I do think that when we ask a why question, looking for a reason, we’re reasoning about that differently than when we ask a why question looking for a causal mechanism. And I think both of those are somewhat different from what we’re looking for when we ask for an explanation in terms of the function or goal. So for example, if you walk into a kitchen store that has all sorts of new kitchen gadgets, and you see something that’s sort of like the strange shape, you say, Well, we know why does it have this strange part poking out over here? You want to know, what’s that for? Right? Why was it designed that way? What’s the function or goal of that property? And that’s, that’s yet another kind of explanation. It

Josh Landy
seems like mechanistic explanations would be more appropriate for objects in the natural world. So you know, why do trees exist? Well give some kind of, you know, Darwinian story or something like that. Whereas, why do the wider strainers exist? Presumably for that, you know, they’re, they’re generated by human beings who have intention. So presumably there you want more like a functional store? Is that about right?

Speaker 7
I think that’s right. But it gets more complicated when you think about things like the products of natural selection. For example, if you want to know why zebras have stripes, probably want to know what the function of that.

Ken Taylor
Right, exactly. And you want to know what the function is, even though there’s not like an intelligent designer. So I agree with you is a complicated thing, sorting through all the kinds of explanations, we’re not going to do that, because that would be a whole show unto itself. But we’ll talk about this a little bit more, you’re listening to philosophy dog. Today, we’re thinking about explanation with Tanya Lombroso, from Princeton University.

Josh Landy
What makes an explanation a good explanation? When you’ve got two good ones? How do you decide which is better? is simplicity always a virtue? Or are there times when it’s best to sacrifice simplicity in order to achieve greater accuracy?

Ken Taylor
explanations, the good, the better and the best when Philosophy Talk continues?

If an explanation seems overly complicated could that be because some things are just hard to explain? I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Laddie and we’re thinking about x One Nation at its best. Our guest is Princeton psychologist Tanya Lambros.

Ken Taylor
So Tanya, clearly, I mean, there’s lots of different kinds of explanation. We granted that. But there’s another sense in which not all explanations are created equal. I mean, there are good explanations. There are bad explanations, and they were beautiful explanations. I think I heard that Creo from a wise person wants two related questions for you. What makes an explanation a good explanation? And then second question, what makes one explanation better than another? Let’s start with the first what makes an explanation a good explanation, then we’ll transition to the second.

Speaker 7
Sure. So I think typically, when we’re trying to explain, we’re explaining why one thing held rather than another. So for example, you come home one day, and you expected your partner to picked up Chinese takeout on the way home. But when you get home, you discover that the food that your partner picked up is Thai food. And so you say why did you get Chinese? And implicitly you’re asking, Why did you get Chinese as opposed to Thai food? And a good explanation is going to be one that allows you to understand why it was Chinese rather than Thai food.

Josh Landy
That doesn’t mean the controversial partner. Absolutely.

Speaker 7
And the contrast there matters, right? Because you might have if you arrived home at two o’clock in the morning expecting food at all, you might ask why is there Chinese food rather than there being afraid at all?

Ken Taylor
So look, I’ve part of the way you said that. It makes it sound like you believe and I just want to make this explicit. Explanation is always a contrastive. There are competing, like hypotheses or something like that and an explanation. And you like choose, you have to choose between them, or do you think that’s right? That excellent

Speaker 7
donations? It’s almost always contrast if and I think the contrast is often not explicit. So it can be subtle, but you’re often You often ask for an explanation when something violated your expectations or was surprising, that doesn’t fit in with your view of the world in some way you think you might learn from, from trying to explain? And so you’re asking why was like this, rather than this other way, which is what I expected or would have understood,

Ken Taylor
but I want to go back to Josh is rejection of my contrasting explanation as a non starter, I’m going to write a novel in which a mystery novel in which my story is true. And everybody’s misled. So because nobody thinks it’s a reasonable contrast, don’t Me. Me. Yeah. Yeah. Where does the contrast class come from? Does the world just say, oh, contrast this thing with that thing? Or is it? Or is the contrast class generated by us? Or I mean, where does the contrast class come from? In the first place?

Speaker 7
I think it comes from human psychology, right? So we’ve built up this repertoire of expectations about the way the world works. And part of what prompts us to seek an explanation in the first place, is that we encounter some sort of an observation that maybe we realize is not already accounted for, by what we know about the world. And so that prompts us to ask a question.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, but then I wonder if it comes just from human psychology? And if it’s not like the world’s options, why are we so confident that by showing that this member of the contrast class beats all the other members of the contrast class, that we’re going to get at the truth about the thing? You know what I mean, because maybe there’s something not in because of our psychology, not in the contrast class, that ought to be there?

Josh Landy
Maybe sometimes at all? Right? Maybe there’s their options. We’re not even thinking about? Yeah,

Speaker 7
that’s right. Maybe there’s a third suspect out there, we should catch. I think we shouldn’t be so competent a lot of the time. I think, in fact, we should often be suspicious of our explanatory preferences, precisely because there’s no guarantee that there’s going to be a good match between what we think is a good or satisfying explanation and the way the world actually works. I think there’s some circumstances under which it can be a pretty good strategy to favorite the explanations we like best, but there’s definitely no guarantee. So I think we should be wearing.

Josh Landy
Okay, so we don’t have a guarantee. But there are there are at least some rules of thumb, for example, you know, people often mentioned outcomes razor simplicity. If you’ve got a couple of at least reasonably plausible candidate explanations for some surprising phenomenon, do you think it makes sense to opt for the simpler one?

Speaker 7
So I think there’s I like to distinguish between what I call explanatory virtues, which are things that seem like good properties of explanations and explanatory vices with which strike is has good properties of explanations, but what we really probably should try to ignore them. And I think simplicity probably isn’t an explanatory virtue, as are many other things that psychologists and philosophers have opposed to, for example, we tend to prefer explanations that are not only simple, but that are broad in scope in the sense that they explain all the observations we want them to explain that are unifying, they take lots of different kinds of phenomena and give them a common explanation. We like explanations that are consistent with our prior beliefs. We often like explanations that tell us what the causal mechanism is that what’s involved with it are fruitful in the sense that they prompt further inquiry. So I think all of those are good candidates for explanatory virtues. I should be distinguished from devices which I can tell you about. Okay,

Josh Landy
that is a great list right? So fruitful, broad, simple, these these are excellent. But can I kind of press you a little bit on the simplicity? I mean, think about Fermat’s Last Theorem, for example, right? That famous, that famous theory But he said he didn’t have enough space in the margin for the proof of this theorem. I mean, no kidding. I mean, it took it took Andrew was, like 129 pages. So I mean, my point is, aren’t there cases where explanations where the phenomena of the world are actually so complicated that we need a complicated explanation. And if we’re opting for a simple one over a complicated one, maybe we’re just making a mistake, maybe it could be an explanatory device, not a virtue.

Speaker 7
I think some of the time we are making a mistake, but there might be good reasons why it’s a, it’s a good strategy to start with a simple explanation. So one reason why might be a good strategy is because the simple explanations typically kind of rule out more possibilities, it’s sort of gonna be consistent with a smaller set of options in the world. And so it’s going to be easier to test if it’s true. So if you make the mistake of picking the simple thing, you’ll quickly discover that you’re wrong. If you make the mistake of choosing a really complicated thing that might be really hard idea to test or to verify based on any observation. So you’re gonna hang out with this false complicated theory longer than you really ought to. So that’s one reason why it might be a good strategy, even if it’s not true that the world is actually simple.

Ken Taylor
So So I agree with you. But I want to test out an intuition a hunch that I’m having about why you think some of the things you think, because I think you’re it’s I think it’s really important that you approach this as partly philosophy, philosophically trained person, but I also take the psychologists in you is playing a major role. I’m not saying that as a criticism, I’m just trying to explore something, because I am wondering, is all this all these explanatory virtues that you say that we think of explanation as having I agree with a lot of those explanatory virtues? But I wonder what makes them? What makes them virtue? Is it a Is that a fact about? The world just is built this way? So that the simplest story is true, though the most genuine now it’s, it’s full of general facts and laws, rather than particular matters of fact? Or is it just that our minds, like are designed to try and make the world be this way? Or is it that there’s a pre established harmony or maybe an evolutionarily established harmony between our minds and the way the world works? I mean, why do we think of the virtues of explanation as virtues? Because it seems to me that’s like not the result of hard won experience, necessarily, but maybe something about the architecture of our minds. I wonder what you think?

Speaker 7
Yeah, I think I agree that the world comes into this, right. So I think it’s gonna have to do with the relationship between the world, the structure of the world and the structure of our explanatory preferences, and of the views you laid out. I think the the evolutionary harmony view is kind of an attractive one, right? The idea is that we had to evolve to be the sorts of creatures who can actually identify real structure in the world, so that we can learn to predict what’s going to happen next, we can learn how things work, so that we can fix them, and we can build bridges and do all these sorts of things.

Josh Landy
Sorry, if we’re getting everything wrong all the time, presumably, we wouldn’t have survived. So

Ken Taylor
yeah, but if but if evolution, such a great designer, why aren’t we getting everything right all the time? Why do we take a march through Phlogiston theory and, and water as a simple element and vitalism? Why why? I mean, history is littered with our evolution, or explanatory failures, really,

Speaker 7
I think the world is pretty complicated place, I might be asking quite a lot of evolution to have quantum mechanics built in their, their contemporary scientific ideas. I mean, the way I think about it is that we have a kind of ideal explanation that we’re looking for in the world, and the world is rarely going to reward us, by giving us an ideal explanation, it’s always going to be more complicated and less beautiful than we’d like. But maybe it’s a really good strategy to approach the world looking for that ideal explanation, because it’s going to make us look in creative ways. It’s gonna make us go beyond the obvious to try to find that simple, underlying structure. And that might turn out to be really valuable for learning.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, so you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about explanation at its best, with Tanya Lombroso, who’s one of the best as explaining explanation, and we’d love to have your contributions, and REO from San Francisco’s on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. I really, what’s your comment or question?

Speaker 6
Yes, just a couple of comments that one is ignoring maybe the motivation of the speaker and who the audience is, and what is the conscience behind the speech and that we can see today with our climate crisis, which is urgent, sometimes, we try to explain to people about the need to take action and you can explain maybe, definitely, and there’s no sense of responsibility, or there’s some kind of disconnect between the response from the explanation. Another example of that is like when, you know, the President Trump is accused of bribery and they generally use cognitive dissonance or accusing their opponents of exactly what their audiences thinking about them. So he chooses his critics of being corrupt and this kind of explanation which psychology is used to sort of skew the interpretation is so It’s so important to be able to analyze today to navigate through the media with

Ken Taylor
REO, reo. There’s there’s a lot there. And I want I want to give Tanya, a chance to dig into some of it. Thank thank thanks for the call. I think the general point about that Oreos making as well as about the use and abuse of explanations. I mean, if our minds are just designed to try and find good explanations, there’s a lot of crappy explanations out there. And people parade explanations that are crappy explanations is good explanations with all kinds of motives. And we sometimes fall for that what’s up with?

Speaker 7
Yeah, I think I think RL raises some really great points. And this is a good point to bring in the idea of explanatory vices, there are things that make us like explanations when we probably shouldn’t. And some of the most prevalent ones are ones that come up in the examples that she raised. So for example, there’s a general psychological phenomenon called motivated reasoning. We often try to make things fit what we want to believe. And one thing that might make us want to believe something could be our political orientation. But another thing could be that it’s a really beautiful explanation. So I think we have to watch out for motivated reasoning, as one thing that might lead us astray when it comes to thinking about explanation really

Ken Taylor
more of a list of explanatory advices, because I take your point, but now we’re talking about the downside of our kind of explanation mongering. And I want to know more about that. So tell me more about explanatory vices.

Speaker 7
Yeah. So one thing that we that psychological research has suggested is that people are often swayed by superficial characteristics of explanations, like the use of jargon. So non experts who hear some neuroscience sprinkled into a psychology explanation, or who have some math sprinkled into a science explanation will think that makes it better. Yeah, I’ve heard people do that.

Ken Taylor
I heard that. No, no, no, I heard that 87.689.

Speaker 7
Go, I’m convinced. That’s something we need to be concerned about. Another one is there’s evidence of people like explanations that appeal to inherent properties of what they’re trying to explain. So for example, if you wanted to explain why girls dress in pink, very often, at least right now in the US, the real explanation probably has to do with all sorts of historically contingent facts, right. And other times in places pink has not been associated with girls have been a feminine color, but now it is. But this human psychological bias is going to lead people to try to find some match between the inherent properties of being a girl and the inherent properties of pink, and give an explanation that links those inherent properties. But you know, the world often doesn’t have those kinds of explanations. And so that’s often something’s gonna lead us astray.

Ken Taylor
Well, is that because I mean, I see that that’s a vise and I see that it’s highly impactful. vices, not just girls is racial groups, and all this, all this stuff, as where are the is the centralizing tendencies that we have, and try to combat come from. But But So I wonder something I mean, I see that this device, but it’s also it’s kind of part of the coin, because if we’re looking for, like the world’s own categories, if our mind is thinking that these are the world’s categories, and worlds categories will prove predictive and deep and explanatory. And if we think like race or gender is the world’s category, not just our category, then it kind of comes with a turf, that we’re going to think of it that way. Right?

Speaker 7
I think sometimes it’ll be fruitful to think that way. But I think even even basic cases about the natural world are often a little more complicated than this idea of an inherent property. So even something like the density of the material is going to be a relational property because it has to do with both its its mass and its volume, right? So so even that, like very basic aspect of the physical world that we do think I think carves nature at its joints in an important way, isn’t going to be inherent in this sense. So probably, I’d say in most cases, I think looking for inherent is not going to be at least true as a description of the world. Again, it might be a good strategy that gets us latches onto properties of the world, then gets us on to a more complicated picture.

Ken Taylor
But I want to ask you a deeply philosophical question. You can ignore it if you want. I don’t know if it’s like, but I do. I wonder there if there’s a question. You mentioned carving nature as a joint. So let’s think there are certain joint carving properties. May we think nature has its joint, okay. And so part of our minds is looking out for what are nature’s joint carving properties? And we’re trying to figure those out. And then there are other properties that aren’t don’t curve nature at the joints. I mean, they they’re they’re human inventions, or social constructions, psychologically speaking, is there a difference in our brains and the way these kinds of these kinds of predicates and kind sit in our minds, I say, Oh, this is a this is a, this is a kind that’s supposed to carve nature of the joint. This is a kind that’s just thrown on us by the social world. And I got to I got to treat them differently. Does our psychology at all reflect that?

Speaker 7
There is evidence that at the extremes, you get quite big differences. For example, the way people think about gold is as something that really carves nature at its joints. And if I suddenly made up a new category, like white things that I first observed on it, too De, you probably don’t think that’s real category. And so if we take those extreme cases, you find distinct psychological signatures of how we reason about those categories. But then you get a lot of sort of gray stuff in the middle. So for example, mental disorders are a category where people vary in how they think about it. And it has some of the properties of the way people think about natural kinds and some of the properties that people think about more conventional kinds of categories. So even though the endpoints might be clear, there’s a lot in the middle. Yeah, this

Ken Taylor
is complicated stuff. Tiny. This is really deep stuff. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re thinking about explanation at its best with Tonya Lombroso, director of the concepts in cognition lab at Princeton University. Human beings

Josh Landy
are relentless explainers. But not every explanation we produce is a good one. Indeed, people sometimes believe remarkably bad explanations. So how do we become better producers and consumers of explanations,

Ken Taylor
making better explanations and making better explainers when Philosophy Talk continues.

If he just wants you to tell him why it happened. Maybe you need to become a better explainer. I’m Ken Taylor. And this is philosophy, the program that questions everything except

Josh Landy
your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy, our guest is Princeton psychologist Tanya Lombroso. And we’re asking about how we explain

Ken Taylor
things. And we’ve got a caller, Phil from Oakland on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Phil, what’s your comment or question?

Speaker 4
Hey, thanks so much for taking my call. The question is about sort of how we ask more radical questions and how, you know, asking a question Can presuppose the context for its answers. So like, if we are metaphysical realists, and we’re wondering, oh, well, how do we explain the world? And we’re trying to find a better explanation. But we’re looking for an explanation that’s going to be like, having a kind of reference and having a kind of materialism involved. And so I guess I’m kind of curious about how, you know, on our pursuit to get better explanations, sometimes we can do the entire thing for even hundreds of years, all within the mindset that the paradigm is going to have to answer with a flavor that we expect it to have. And yeah, kind of curious about, about that.

Ken Taylor
So Tanya, got a you got an answer for Phil, that’s a complicated question. I’ll let you make of it what you will?

Speaker 7
It is? I think that’s a great question. So I think there’s one aspect of explanation that means that we tend to be sort of conservative when we’re explaining we try to explain things in a way that fits in with our prior beliefs. We want to make sense of it. And so we’re going to be often less inclined to posit these radical things that we don’t yet really understand. But that’s often what’s needed to pose radical questions like Phil suggested, or to have a scientific revolution of some kind. In terms of strategies for asking more radical questions. I think one thing is that I mentioned earlier in the show that often when we ask an explanation, we have sort of an implicit contrast in mind, I think being clear about what that contrast is, can be a first step towards having a better sense of what we’re presupposing and even asking the question, and then maybe trying to think more broadly about other ways things could have been.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. So I wonder what you think. I mean, this is really, I think this is a deeply important question. Because you said, I mean, I don’t know if what you said or Josh had or something. I mean, there’s how scientists do it. And there’s how we, as individuals do it, the individual learner, the title is scientists. But here’s the thing about science is that it’s an elaborate social structure in which the individual fits in as part, and it’s got this elaborate system of rewards and upsetting scientific applecart with a new with the theory of with with, you know, quantum gravity or something, or, or, or quantum mechanics or the theory of evolution, eventually, that gets you great rewards, right? In the individual case, when we don’t have this elaborate social structure. It’s a little different. So I wonder how much of this kind of revolutionary capacity for evolution is rooted in just Hume individual psychology? And how much of it depends on there being a social structure that rewards and encourages that? I don’t know if you’ve thought about that, because that’s not a purely psych psychological kind of question.

Speaker 7
Yeah, I think I think it’s a great question. And it’s an important analogy between our sort of everyday quasi scientific reasoning and the way that the institutional structure of science works. I think there probably are important differences. But I also want to emphasize all of the resources we have as individuals for thinking in a more creative sorts of ways. So one speculation that I’m curious if Josh would agree with is that if you look at other things that we do, like read science fiction, and engage in thought experiments, and all sorts of imaginative exercises, and so on, one way to think about some of what’s going on there is that we’re exploring the space of possible explanations in a way that we’re, we’re doing in a way it’s unconstrained by what we might think is true of the real world right now, but that might open our eyes to other kinds of possibilities that we might actually come to adopt in the future.

Josh Landy
Well, it may surprise you to hear this but I agree with you very strongly. That’s a beautiful way of thinking about one of the virtues of science fiction and you know, I I wonder whether you I mean, because obviously, we’ve got a whole host of explanatory vices that you’ve talked about, right. And I think about people’s readiness to accept certain kinds of wacky conspiracy theories and the confirmation bias you’re talking about earlier and the way in which our motions get involved and, and and we we bring to the table, these prior senses of how the world works, and we, and people seem to tend to want to have one size fits all explanations, right? Everything is neoliberalism. Everything is, you know, sacks or whatever, the explanations, so I guess I’m wondering, science fiction or, or, or something else that what’s gonna what’s gonna be the best remedy for these explanatory devices? How do we get people to, to recognize that sometimes they’re being led astray and picking the bad explanation and and and tempt them to a better path.

Ken Taylor
So Josh is doing something to you, you I mean, you’re a research cognitive psychologist, and they’re just doing talking to you. I know you guys get done a lot. He’s asking you to give the human world therapy. I know you’re not a therapist on you, but put on your therapists hat to talk to.

Speaker 7
Alright, so you want my two pieces of advice is as a psychologist, everyday explainers. So here’s the kicker, the two things that I would say. So first, I think we should try to avoid devices. And I think the first step towards avoiding them is to recognize them. Right? So if we know that we tend to be overly swayed by things like jargon, and when I didn’t mention, but length people tend to like longer explanation, since I call it these days where you can, you know, evaluate word count. And if we know we tend to be swayed by these sorts of things, we can at least be a little more critical when we encounter an explanation like that, right? We find it satisfying. And then we have to ask ourselves, is that really a good explanation? Or did it just sort of sound like the person knew what they were talking about? And that’s really what I’m picking up on? So that’s a piece of advice number one. Okay, go number two. Number two is that I think, instead of thinking about producing the best explanations or rejecting the worst explanations, I think we should think about being better explainers. Right being being better at engaging in the activity of explaining. And one reason that’s really valuable, is illustrated by a phenomenon that psychologists call the illusion of explanatory depth. And what this is, is that if you ask people, How well do you understand how a microwave works, or how a zipper works? Or how any number of other kinds of systems works? A lot of people say, Oh, I think I understand that pretty well, I think I could explain that. And then you say, Okay, explain it. We can give them a moment for you or listeners to try to imagine explaining how a zebra works, it seems incredibly easy. But once you actually try to explain it, you come to appreciate all of these gaps in what you thought you knew. So I think just engaging in the practice of actually explaining to yourself or to somebody else, is a good kind of reality check. It sort of helps you be calibrated about what you actually do. When you don’t know, in the course of doing that you might know this is realizing to learn

Ken Taylor
this is not a minor point, this is a really important point. Because it turns out, I don’t know if you know this, but we actually had a former Berkeley colleague of yours on our show recently, it turns out that most people cannot explain the mechanism behind global warming, even people, pro pro environment and all that they cannot explain the mechanism of global warming. And climate denialism goes down as soon as you explain to people what the mechanism is, right? Because it’s a it’s a simple, elegant, beautiful thing. And so it’s a striking, right, how many explanations we think we know, and we don’t know, and how many things we think we can explain when we don’t. And this has huge social consequences. So I think you’re making a really important

Josh Landy
point. And this in a way brings us back by if I might, I don’t know, I hate to be a kind of tariff person here. But But, but also brings us back to literature. Or you made this lovely point, Tonya about reading as cultivating our capacity to imagine different possibilities. Also think about explaining reading, right, the kind of work that literary critics do that art critics do the film film critics do. If we all engage in that practice, I mean, that’s not a bad habit to get into. We’ve got a complicated artifact in front of us. That is puzzling. And we’re, you know, if we invite ourselves to try to account for it, give an explanation for it. Well, what about that is a kind of a training ground for these good habits of explanation?

Speaker 7
Absolutely. I mean, I think I think one of the things that I find compelling and reading fiction is that just as in real life, you find yourself trying to explain why people behave the way they do you do this means fictional worlds do. But often in the fictional worlds, you get to explore the experiences inside somebody else’s head or in worlds that are very different from our own. And so you’re going to have opportunities to engage in that kind of explanatory enterprise that might go beyond what you would in your everyday experience.

Josh Landy
Right. And this brings me to another question. We didn’t talk yet about beautiful explanations, right. So we’ve talked about good ones and bad ones, but but I love this idea that they’re a beautiful explanation. I think it’s totally true and, and I certainly feel that way about some explanations of artworks. I feel that way about some scientific ethics. coronations of phenomena. So what does it make something beautiful? You know? Yeah, we’ve talked about that being potentially dangerous, right? You get seduced by the beauty. But But aren’t there cases where it’s just a good thing? You have this elegant, beautiful explanation? That’s exciting. Maybe it’s, it requires ingenuity to have come up with it. It’s it’s got these beautiful clean lines. I mean, can you say something about that? Like, what does it make an explanation elegant? And can there be elegant explanations that aren’t just misleading?

Speaker 7
So I tend to think of beautiful explanations as explanations that exhibit all of the explanatory virtues to a great extent, right? So a beautiful explanation is one that’s not only simple, but also explains a lot, for example, and does it in a way that’s fruitful and so on. Right. So when you get all these monetary virtues, right, yeah, I think I think that’s the core of it. And those can be true. I mean, certainly they can be I think the thing that we need to be wary of is thinking that just because they’re beautiful, that that’s enough to be done to think we know we’ve done the job of showing their true when we can stop, I think it can be a start to inquiry rather than an entity inquiry.

Ken Taylor
So I’m going to ask you a question about education. Because all of us are in the business of educating the young, I said something like to a bunch of students, when the first day of class your I said, I’m trying, I said these are Stanford freshmen, they’re brilliant. But I said you don’t know how to read. Because here’s what you’ve been trained to do, you read something sort of half a half read it, and you expect the professor to explain it to you. And I said, if you are the explained to, you will get less out understanding then if you are the explainer. So I want you to be in the mode of trying to come up with explanations for what’s going on on your own. And we’ll talk about them together and try to sort the good from the bad, but you’ve got to be an active explainer to really achieve understanding, not just a consumer of explanations, do you think I was giving them this advice or good advice?

Speaker 7
I think that was excellent advice. And you might not have known it kind of but it’s backed up by a couple of decades of research in psychology. So there’s that there’s a phenomenon called the self explanation effect. And I’m willing to bet we’ve all experienced it. And it’s basically the phenomenon that sometimes you come to understand something better as a result of explaining it to yourself or to somebody else. And that’s very different from being a consumer of an explanation. When you’re the consumer of an explanation. You’ve got new information that you didn’t have before. But when you’re the one doing the explaining, it’s not that you’re getting new information that wasn’t in your head already. So you’re somehow rearranging it in a way that so

Ken Taylor
why don’t we make our educational system to exploit the fact that humans are inveterate explanation monitors, and to try and make them more hungry for deeper, more explanatory explanations, because that’s what the brain wants to do. Why is our education system the way it is?

Speaker 7
So I do think to some extent, teachers are aware of this and they use it in their, in their classrooms, often what the reason you have group activities, and peer tutoring, and so on is precisely because those kinds of activities promote explanation. But I think I want to correct I think, perhaps a presupposition in what you just said. So I think I think it is true that we’re explanation seeking creatures, but we’re also so selective about what we seek explanations for. Right? So you can you can, in principle, explain anything, you know, why is this wall white? Right? Why is why is this yellow? You know, why is it exactly 252 Right now, and so on. And most of the things that we could explain from our environment, we don’t bother to explain. So even though we’re extremely motivated to explain, I think we’re also extremely selective.

Ken Taylor
I think you’re I think you’re right, look, I think we’ve just scratched the tip of the iceberg. And this is a deep subject, but unfortunately, radio you know, it has its time constraints, and

Josh Landy
why is

Ken Taylor
that? Money. But that is oh, I have to I have to thank you for joining us. It’s been a fascinating conversation.

Unknown Speaker
Thanks for having me.

Ken Taylor
I guess it’s been Tonya Lombroso. She’s a professor of psychology at Princeton University director of the concepts and cognition lab there. So Josh, can you explain to me what you think?

Josh Landy
I think is such a fascinating field. I mean, you’ve on the one side you’ve got like mansplaining is awful motivations for explaining and you’ve got bad explanations like conspiracy theories, and yet again, skeleton key theories and everything’s neoliberalism. On the other side, you’ve got not just great explanations, but beautiful explanations and, and and that are true, both true and beautiful. And, you know, at the end of the day, I think I love your advice, the best can you know, thank you, you’re welcome. Go out. I mean, also, Tanya, right, go out there and explain things get in the habit. Even if zippers even an everyday thing. Get in the habit of explaining things, you’ll understand things better, and you’ll become a more a better contributor to discourse.

Ken Taylor
I totally agree. I mean, though, there’s much to explain the habit of searching for explanations and important part of the human mind. There are deep questions here. And one of the thing I love best about like, Tanya, she’s bringing psychology and philosophy back together after their, their separation 100 plus years ago, but anyway, this conversation continues that follows suffers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto with apologies to Descartes, well, no apologies to Descartes Cogito ergo Blago. I think therefore I blog. And you can become a partner in that community by visiting our website, Philosophy Talk dot o RG.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments at Philosophy Talk. org, and we may feature it on our blog. Now can anyone possibly explain how fast this guy talks? It’s Ian Scholes, The 62nd philosopher.

Ian Shoales
He chose Occam’s razor that clean blade which matches the shorter straight line from effect to cause the best the simplest explanation has been doled given away to Goodwill which wouldn’t even take it because that’s a razor. A child might swallow it could get infected by bacteria and caused the death of 1000s of preteens in small towns in Ohio, which 42 Drinking water and don’t vaccinate their children. It’s not a moral panic. It’s a simple abandoning of common sense. We pretend we are great believers in common sense, but it’s more honored in the breach, as they say than the observance. Oh, the circles are logic weaves experts have always been with us and they’re quite good if left to their own advices and not telling us to avoid microwaves. They Potter about invent things like cars and phones and stereos and philosophical systems and stage productions and movies and highways. When it comes to explaining it all. They often come a cropper part of it has to do with how complicated it all is. Now tell me how a car works well first you need to explain how internal combustion works before that need to share the concepts of flammability tiny explosions moving parts the wheel and by extrapolation, automobile factories license plates, union mergers overseas competition, freeways, dirt roads, drag races climate change, I mean, where do you even begin? 10 years from now we might don’t even have cars or we’ll all be dead from global warming so why bother? Okay, so keep up with the time and try to explain solar wind power and immediately get fossil fuel propagandists accusing you of being a traitor to the free marketplace. And if you support the local zoo, you’re a socialist. Common sense is history. Look what happened to mansplaining. It used to be the Yankee way of knowledge some guy hopefully patches on the elbows of his cardigan, knocking the data from his pipe explain the principles of stereophonic sound or windchill factor that’s a good one to a woman or child until you run screaming from the room to forge a new life in California. In some cases, restraining orders are issued with no men to explain how they work. That’s chaos. Of course, you’ve always had a degree of Magical Thinking and the way we approach problems we have astrology, which still posts predictions next to the news. We have conspiracy theories. We have Democrats or Republicans magical beings, aspects of which are debated and shift daily. We have a leader President Trump who has ramrod and the callback crew is more given to stampeding herd loud boastful blather than soothing the Longhorns Jenoptik tunes, we dash Hitler that they’re confused. So now we resort to complicated even paranoid schemes to explain how things work Trump colluded with Russia to win the election. No, no. Well, Democrats go to the elite to collude with Russia to what now it’s very confusing. And every red flag could be a false flag depending on whether you’re watching Hannity or mad out the very frustration of trying to explain the very simplest of actions like making your bed and lying in it, which used to be child play, not kissing a blues frequent I think isn’t going away getting somebody in charge you as our welfare in mind and not some personal pocket book driven agenda. Well, well, you look at that room, there’s an elephant in there. It’s full of elephants, in fact, so let’s just not go in that room anymore. Is that a solution? No. Well, maybe there’s not a problem. Then think of that. Instead of us invent say, Q anon which uncovered a global conspiracy of pedophile bureaucrats I think headed by Hillary Clinton for some reason. And Donald Trump is going to throw them all in jail and take charge. So he is not in charge now. No. Election 2016 You got some splainin to do get a man to do it though. Yeah, just for old times sake. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of K LW local public radio San Francisco, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2019.

Josh Landy
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Tina permintaan.

Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kassala Angela Johnston and Lauren Schecter.

Ken Taylor
Support for philosophy top comes from Stanford University and from the partners at our online community of thinkers. The views expressed

Josh Landy
or mis expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other fun, but even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot o RG where you too can become a partner in our community of

Ken Taylor
thinkers. I’m Josh Landy and I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening and thank you for thinking.