ABSTRACT

There is much recent evidence showing that explanation is central to various cognitive processes. On the other hand, philosophers have argued that the notions of explanation and explanation quality are too subjective for explanation to play any role in science: what may be an adequate explanation for one person may fail to be so for another. We compare the results of a study tasking participants with rating explanation quality with those of an eye-tracking study, finding that ratings of explanation quality from participants in the former study were strongly predictive of the ease with which participants in the latter study processed text fragments presenting the same explanations that were used in the rating study. This finding undermines the thought that explanation is only in the eye of the beholder.

摘要

最近有许多证据表明，解释对于各种认知过程至关重要。另一方面，哲学家认为，解释和解释质量的概念过于主观，以至于解释无法在科学中发挥任何作用：对于一个人来说，适当的解释可能对另一个人则不适用。我们比较了一项研究的结果，该研究要求参与者给予具有等级解释质量的评估结果和一项眼动追踪研究的结果，发现前一项研究的参与者对解释质量的评级强烈地预测了后者研究的参与者处理文本片段的难易程度提出与评级研究相同的解释。这一发现破坏了这样的思想，即解释仅在情人眼中。