Scientific Explanation And The Sense Of Understanding*

By J. D. Trout. 2002

256 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, History and Philosophy of Science, Molecular Biology

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Citations in the corpus

Explanation in Human-AI Systems: A Literature Meta-Review, Synopsis of Key Ideas and Publications, and Bibliography for Explainable AI (2019, background): “ causation or causal mechanisms, and causal analyses are believed to have explanatory value (Cohen, 2008; Halpern and Pearl, 2005a,b; Krull and Anderson, 1997; Pearl, 1988; Pearl and Mackenzie, 2018; Trout, 2002). Explanations relate the event being explained to principles and invoke causal relation”
Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (2004, background): “As a result, we tend to be overconfident about the power of our subjective reasoning faculties and about the reliability of our predictions (Trout 2002).”
The Instrumental Value of Explanations (2011, background): “Relatedly, Trout (2002, 2007, 2008) argues that the sense of understanding that accompanies an explanation is a poor guide to the truth of that explanation.”
Explanation, understanding, and control (2014, unknown): “…defends the naturalistic thesis that “genuine understanding” is distinct from the phenomenological “sense of understanding,” because psychological biases (such as overconfidence and hindsight bias; see Trout 2002) can result in the feeling of understanding in the absence of genuine understanding.”
A dialogue system specification for explanation (2011, background): “The “feels-right” explanation is often associated with bias (Trout 2002, pp. 223–228).”
The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations (2008, background): “In general, people often believe explanations because they find them intuitively satisfying, not because they are accurate (Trout, 2002).”
Understanding Why: The cognitive science of explanation (2008, background): “Explanations are even used as a basis for assessing truth (Sloman, 1994; Trout, 2002; Lombrozo, 2007).”
Why Attention is Not Explanation: Surgical Intervention and Causal Reasoning about Neural Models (2020, background): “• Psychological Theories (Trout, 2002; De Regt, 2009; Khalifa, 2012) and their critics investigate explanation not as the satisfaction of any particular argumentative structure, but rather as acts or pieces of information that generate a sense of understanding in the agents (real or ideal) who…”
Deconstructing the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations (2015, unknown): “This effect could be thought of as part of a family of heuristics that people use for judging the quality of explanations, which includes teleological information (Lombrozo & Carey, 2006) and an intuitive sense of satisfaction (Trout, 2002).”