Play is rich and fascinating; it is also strange and puzzling. It is playing all kinds of tricks with seriously-minded thinkers and researchers. Play is easy to recognize in children below one year of age, yet professors at the zenith of their play-research career are struggling to work out a simple and useful definition of […]
Digital Event
In contrast to the animal play that is covered in the special issue of Learning & Behavior dedicated to The Evolutionary and Psychological Significance of Play, humans often use elaborate representation (language and other symbols) in their play. An example that occurs during contemporary Christmas season is the elf-on-the-shelf. By the time I visited homes […]
The Digital Event on The Evolutionary and Psychological Significance of Play got under way yesterday with an overview post. Today is the first day of this event, and it serves to introduce the special issue of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Learning & Behavior on which it is based. In June of 2016, the Chicago Zoological […]
We all know what it means to play. We play badminton, we play with others, we are playfully exploring an environment…. Come to think of it, there is so much to playing, what does it mean to play? According to the Oxford English dictionary, the verb “play” has 7 different meanings, ranging from “Engaging in […]
Our digital event on the processes of explanation came to a conclusion on Friday. The series of 6 posts covered various aspects of the special issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, guest edited by Andrei Cimpian and Frank Keil, that was dedicated to the psychology of explanations. However, this does not mean that the […]
What’s stopping scientists from building a machine that provides sensible explanations? Let’s be clear: what we need is a machine that explains simple matters, not free will or the plot of Inception. For instance, how would you respond if I asked you why apples don’t grow underground? Perhaps you’d say, “Because apples are a type […]
Explanation matters. Explanation is a central part of coming to an understanding of the world around us. So it is no surprise that the question of what makes “a good explanation” has been a long-standing interest of philosophers, in particular philosophers of science. Their work, in turn, has influenced and motivated psychologists interested in everyday […]
We all see things through the lens of our own interests, and one of my interests is in the limitations of formal models for thinking in general and scientific thinking in particular. Consider as a formal model one that is applicable no matter the content area. The equation 2+2=4 is a formal model, because it […]
The word that came to mind as I read the collection of articles in the special issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review dedicated to the processes of explanation was “progress.” The nature of explanation has of course been a core concern of cognitive scientists ever since there have been cognitive scientists. Yet, with a few important […]
Explanations are crucial to our cognitive lives because they inform our understanding of the world, structure our concepts, and guide our actions. Yet, the processes that underlie explanation remain largely unknown: How do people generate, evaluate, and use explanations? Answering this question is a major challenge, since even a rough specification of the processes involved […]