Colombo, Matteo and Postma, Marie and Sprenger, Jan (2016) Explanatory Judgment, Probability, and Abductive Inference. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Abductive reasoning assigns special status to the explanatory power of a hypothesis. But how do people make explanatory judgments? Our study clarifies this issue by asking: (i) How does the explanatory power of a hypothesis cohere with other cognitive factors? (ii) How does probabilistic information affect explanatory judgments? In order to answer these questions, we conducted an experiment with 671 participants. Their task was to make judgments about a potentially explanatory hypothesis and its cognitive virtues. In the responses, we isolated three constructs: Explanatory Value, Rational Acceptability, and Entailment. Explanatory judgments strongly cohered with judgments of causal relevance and with a sense of understanding. Furthermore, we found that Explanatory Value was sensitive to manipulations of statistical relevance relations between hypothesis and evidence, but not to explicit information about the prior probability of the hypothesis. These results indicate that probabilistic information about statistical relevance is a strong determinant of Explanatory Value. More generally, our study suggests that abductive and probabilistic reasoning are two distinct modes of inference.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Colombo, Matteo m.colombo@uvt.nl Postma, Marie m.nilsenova@gmail.com Sprenger, Jan j.sprenger@uvt.nl
Keywords:	Human Reasoning; Abduction; Explanatory Judgment; Explanatory Value; Probability.
Subjects:	General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > Experimentation General Issues > Explanation Specific Sciences > Psychology
Depositing User:	Jan Sprenger
Date Deposited:	17 May 2016 14:41
Last Modified:	17 May 2016 14:41
Item ID:	12098
Subjects:	General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > Experimentation General Issues > Explanation Specific Sciences > Psychology
Date:	13 May 2016
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/12098

Available Versions of this Item

• Explanatory Value and Probabilistic Reasoning: An Empirical Study. (deposited 03 May 2014 13:04)
  • Explanatory Judgment, Probability, and Abductive Inference. (deposited 17 May 2016 14:41) [Currently Displayed]
  • Explanatory Value and Probabilistic Reasoning. (deposited 26 Mar 2015 14:30)

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