Abstract
Traditionally different approaches to the study of cognition have been viewed as competing explanatory frameworks. An alternative view, explanatory pluralism, regards different approaches to the study of cognition as complementary ways of studying the same phenomenon, at specific temporal and spatial scales, using appropriate methodological tools. Explanatory pluralism has been often described abstractly, but has rarely been applied to concrete cases. We present a case study of explanatory pluralism. We discuss three separate ways of studying the same phenomenon: a perceptual decision-making task (Bahrami et al., 2010), where pairs of subjects share information to jointly individuate an oddball stimulus among a set of distractors. Each approach analyzed the same corpus but targeted different units of analysis at different levels of description: decision-making at the behavioral level, confidence sharing at the linguistic level, and acoustic energy at the physical level. We discuss the utility of explanatory pluralism for describing this complex, multiscale phenomenon, show ways in which this case study sheds new light on the concept of pluralism, and highlight good practices to critically assess and complement approaches.
Highlights
Behavioral and cognitive processes are complex phenomena spanning multiple scales of organization, which may require multiple approaches to be fully understood
Their goal was to test the question: Would two people be able to integrate their perceptual information, as individuals integrate information from different senses, in order to optimize their decisions? In other words, would two heads be better than one, and in particular, better than the best individual performance in a pair? They found that when two people were given the opportunity to communicate freely about their level of confidence on a trial-by-trial basis, two heads became better than one. This collaborative benefit was dependent on the interlocutors being good at solving the task on their own: differently performing interlocutors would not benefit from collaboration. We argue that this joint decision-making paradigm provides a concrete case study for assessing explanatory pluralism
What is important to understand is that all three levels are describing the same phenomenon, and there are certainly more levels of description that can be included. Asking these cross-level questions might persuade some to argue for reductionism, e.g., “does linguistic alignment just merely reduce to complexity matching?” or “how does linguistic alignment interact with dyad-level perceptual asymmetries?” We suggest that there is interdependence across levels, where theories can inform each other, leading to a better understanding of the phenomenon
Summary
Behavioral and cognitive processes are complex phenomena spanning multiple scales of organization, which may require multiple approaches to be fully understood. In this case there is no explicit model fitting or experimentation across levels, but rather a theoretical analysis of how multiple independently motivated analyses of the target phenomenon, framed at different temporal and spatial scales, are related to one another.
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