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{
    "pk": 26139,
    "title": "Explanatory Judgment, Probability, and Abductive Inference",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Abductive reasoning assigns special status to the explanatorypower of a hypothesis. But how do people make explana-tory judgments? Our study clarifies this issue by asking: (i)How does the explanatory power of a hypothesis cohere withother cognitive factors? (ii) How does probabilistic informa-tion affect explanatory judgments? In order to answer thesequestions, we conducted an experiment with 671 participants.Their task was to make judgments about a potentially explana-tory hypothesis and its cognitive virtues. In the responses, weisolated three constructs: Explanatory Value, Rational Accept-ability, and Entailment. Explanatory judgments strongly co-hered with judgments of causal relevance and with a sense ofunderstanding. Furthermore, we found that Explanatory Valuewas sensitive to manipulations of statistical relevance relationsbetween hypothesis and evidence, but not to explicit infor-mation about the prior probability of the hypothesis. Theseresults indicate that probabilistic information about statisticalrelevance is a strong determinant of Explanatory Value. Moregenerally, our study suggests that abductive and probabilisticreasoning are two distinct modes of inference.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Human Reasoning; Abduction; Explanatory Judg-ment; Explanatory Value; Probability."
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02p839fc",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Matteo",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Colombo",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Tilburg University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Marie",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Postma-Nilsenova",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Tilburg University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Jan",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Sprenger",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Tilburg University",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2016-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26139/galley/15775/download/"
        }
    ]
}