Sangeet Khemlani

Ruth Byrne and I organized a symposium at this year’s International Conference on Thinking 2024, and it included talks by Byrne, Jeff Zemla, Emily Liquin, and myself. Here’s the full abstract of the workshop:

Explanations are the by-products of comprehension; you’ve mastered an idea only once you can explain it properly. Belief in a particular explanation can have wide-ranging consequences for behavior. Accurate explanations, such as those developed and advanced through scientific discovery, can unlock deeper knowledge and lead to new ideas and technologies. Inaccurate explanations are fuel for conspiracy theory and misinformation. This symposium features research that reveals the power and purpose of explanatory reasoning: Jeff Zemla (Syracuse University) will describe new research on how mechanistic mindsets can lower perceptions of explanatory understanding. Ruth Byrne (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) will report experiments on preferences for simple causal and counterfactual explanations, for diagnoses and for predictions. Zach Horne (University of Edinburgh, UK) will talk about the explanations scientists generate during the course of their research. Sunny Khemlani (US Naval Research Laboratory) will discuss explanations that appeal to temporal relations, and the errors reasoners make when they are convinced their temporal explanations are true. And Emily Liquin (New York University, US) will focus on how curiosity drives children and adults to construct better explanations. The symposium will end with a panel discussion on the theoretical challenges in building models of explanatory reasoning.