{"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":"2016-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26139/galley/15775/download/"}]}