{"pk":28484,"title":"Simulating Explanatory Coexistence:Integrated, Synthetic, and Target-Dependent Reasoning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Understanding the cognitive structure of explanations— andthe cognitive processes that assemble them— is a milestonefor understanding how people learn and communicate. Re-cent research on explanatory coexistence suggests that peo-ple’s causal beliefs are less globally coherent than previouslythought: people use seemingly-competing supernatural and bi-ological causes to explain different aspects of the same phe-nomenon, or they assemble supernatural and biological causesinto single, coherent explanations (Legare & Gelman, 2008;Legare & Shtulman, 2018; Shtulman & Lombrozo, 2016).This coexistence— and unexpected coherence— of diversecausal mechanisms poses interesting questions about the roleof coherence and fragmentation in people’s mental models andexplanations. This paper presents a computational model ofexplanatory coherence in the well-characterized domain of dis-ease transmission, extending a previous cognitive model ofexplanation-based conceptual change (Friedman, Forbus, &Sherin, 2018). Our approach (1) retrieves diverse causal modelfragments based on the phenomenon to explain, (2) assem-bles coherent causal models using relevance-directed abduc-tive reasoning, and (3) selects explanatory paths that supportwithin-explanation and within-scenario coherence. Our modelsimulates the three different types of explanatory coexistencedetailed in the literature.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"cognitive modeling; explanatory coexistence; AI;abductive reasoning; explanation"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7k97m6jd","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Scott","middle_name":"E.","last_name":"Friedman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Smart Information Flow Technologies","department":""},{"first_name":"Micah","middle_name":"B.","last_name":"Goldwater","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Sydney","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28484/galley/18355/download/"}]}