Modes Of Explanation Research Articles

Human Perception of Robot Failure and Explanation During a Pick-and-Place Task

In recent years, researchers have extensively used non-verbal gestures, such as head and arm movements, to express a robot's intentions and capabilities to humans. Inspired by past research, we investigated how different explanation modalities can aid human understanding and perception of how robots communicate failures and provide explanations during block pick-and-place tasks. Through an in-person, within-subjects experiment with 24 participants, we studied four modes of explanations across four types of failures. Some of these were chosen to mimic combinations from prior work in order to both extend and replicate past findings by the community. We found that speech explanations were preferred to non-verbal and visual cues in terms of similarity to humans. Additionally, projected images had a comparable effect on explanation as other non-verbal modules. We also found consistent results with a prior online study.

IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND: ON THE HISTORY OF MIND AND OTHER MATTERS

ABSTRACTIn The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Perspective of Meaning, Jonas Ahlskog presents a critical and lucid engagement with contemporary philosophies of history and makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch. What philosophy needs again is, first, a recognition of the “primacy of method”—that is, the insight that what one knows about reality depends on how one knows it. Second, philosophers need to take “the duality of method” seriously again and to recognize that the modes of explanation in the human sciences and the natural sciences are categorically different from each other—especially now that this difference has been blurred in recent debates about the Anthropocene. Ahlskog's book is thus also a contribution to the classical debate about causal explanation versus meaningful understanding. On closer analysis, however, Ahlskog's “untimely meditations” on “historical method” suffer from an insufficient engagement with counterarguments. A first line of critique challenges the idea that human action cannot be explained causally. A second line of critique challenges the idea that all aspects of human action can be “understood,” because the unintended aspects and consequences of individual actions cannot. These require causal explanation. A third line of critique concerns Ahlskog's denial of the fundamental plurality of ideas of history and the social sciences. Squeezing this plurality into one philosophical mold comes at a price. Unintentionally, Ahlskog's “untimely meditations” also show that much.

The Epigenesis of Germs and Dispositions in Logic and Life: Kant’s System of Pure Reason and His Concept of Race

Abstract In the 1787 Transcendental Deduction of the Categories Kant indicates the only possible ways by which one can account for a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects (B166), using analogies between modes of explanation and biological theories about the origin of life. He endorses epigenesis as a model for his system of pure reason (B167). This paper examines various interpretive claims about the meaning of this theory of generation and its significance for Kant’s philosophy (Section 1), showing that, after his Critical shift in perspective, in 1775/77 Kant already combined preformed elements and their purposively oriented formation by natural forces (Section 2). Contrary to the standard view, Kant’s theory of race appears to constitute the background to assess Blumenbach’s later (1799/1781) shift to epigenesis after supporting Haller’s preformism (Section 3). In Section 4, I argue that the ground of affinity between epigenesis and formal idealism rests in tracing the first origin of these conformities: external a posteriori climate conditions and predisposed germs and dispositions within the generative power of the human body; and external a posteriori experience and spontaneous a priori concepts of its objects, within pure sensory intuiting and pure thinking. In both cases the external empirical conditions would function as occasioning propelling factors affecting internal pre-established forms of generation.

Perpetrators’ folk explanations of their regretted and justified aggressive behaviors

ABSTRACT When people explain why they behaved aggressively, they can refer to their thought process that led to their aggressive behavior – so-called reason explanations – or to other factors that preceded their thought process – so-called causal history of reasons explanations. People’s choice of what mode of explanation they give might be affected by whether they want to distance themselves (or not) from their past aggressive behaviors. To test these ideas, participants in the current study (N = 429) either recalled an aggressive behavior they regret or an aggressive behavior they believe was justified. Participants then explained why they behaved aggressively. Mostly, people gave reason explanations for their aggressive behaviors, which is consistent with past research on how people explain intentional behaviors. Further, and as predicted, participants who explained behaviors they believe were justified gave (relatively) more reason explanations and participants who explained behaviors they regretted gave (relatively) more causal history of reasons explanations. These findings are consistent with the idea that participants adjust their explanations to either provide a rationale for, or to distance themselves from, their past aggressive behaviors.

Perpetrators', Victims', and Witnesses' Folk Explanations of Aggressive Behaviors.

Unsurprisingly, victims and perpetrators often view aggressive behaviors differently. The current study examined whether victims, perpetrators, and witnesses also explained aggressive behaviors differently. The current study included 408 participants who recalled a time when they harmed another person (i.e., perpetrator memory), when another person harmed them (i.e., victim memory), and when they witnessed an aggressive behavior (i.e., witness memory). Replicating past research, participants rated their recalled aggressive behaviors from the victim perspective as being more harmful and less justified than they did for their recalled behaviors from the perpetrator perspective. When examining their explanations for the behaviors, participants most often explained their own aggressive behaviors by referring to their mental deliberations that led to their behavior (i.e., reason explanations). In comparison, they referred to background causal factors (i.e., causal history of reasons explanations)-such as personality traits, demographic factors, cultural norms, etc.-more when explaining others' aggressive behaviors, especially when the explanation was from the victim perspective. These findings show the subtleties in how people communicate about their aggressive interactions: When communicating about their own aggressive behaviors, people use modes of explanations that portray their behaviors as sensible, and when communicating about a time when another person behaved aggressively towards them, people use modes of explanations that omit the thought processes that led to those behaviors.

Dispersals from the West Tethys as the source of the Indo-West Pacific diversity hotspot in comatulid crinoids

AbstractConspicuous centers of biodiversity are frequently attributed to local conditions that promote speciation or resistance to extinction, but recent diversification studies indicate this mode of explanation might not be very general, so it may be fruitful to revisit the role of dispersal in concentrating biodiversity. Here we consider the processes underlying the marine diversity hotspot in the Indo-West Pacific among comatulid crinoids, suspension-feeding echinoderms conspicuous on modern tropical reefs. We used ancestral-range reconstruction on a phylogeny of extant crinoids, assembled a new occurrence database of fossil comatulids and interrogated it with probabilistic preservational models, and developed a morphological character matrix to estimate the relationships among living and fossil comatulids. Ancestral-range reconstruction on a phylogeny of extant comatulids recovers an origin outside the Indo-Pacific and elevated dispersal into it. A new occurrence database records the comatulid clade spreading out gradually from origin in the Early Jurassic of the West Tethys. Comatulids do not appear in their modern hotspot until the Oligocene, and taphonomic analyses show these results cannot be explained solely as a result of inadequate sampling in Asia and Oceania. Finally, phylogenetic analyses demonstrate that deeply nested crown-group comatulids had originated before the clade became well established in the East Tethys, implying many independent dispersals into the modern hotspot. These consilient results suggest a biodiversity hotspot that owes its existence to dispersals out of the ancient West Tethys rather than to elevated in situ diversification.

Ethological Problems with the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide.

Joiner and colleagues' Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (IPTS), a prominent "desire-capability" model of suicide-based on the common-sense idea that people take their own lives because they want to, and can-is critiqued from a biological perspective. Tinbergen's ethological "four questions" guide the analysis: evolution, survival value, ontogeny, and proximate causation, each addressing a different aspect of biological understanding. Problems for IPTS emerge with all four. As a parsimonious solution, the desire-capability hypothesis is reconceived as an ultimate, instead of proximate, mode of explanation. By this light, desire and capability for suicide combined in our species' ancestral past, thus making suicide a recurrent survival threat, and driving the evolution of special-purpose defensive adaptations. This stance tallies with the pain-brain theory of the evolution of suicide, and with Joiner and colleagues' own investigation into organismic anti-suicide defenses, which appears to conflict conceptually with IPTS. These defenses' evolved algorithm may make suicide an intrinsically aleatory phenomenon, opaque to usefully accurate prediction. Positive implications for prevention and research are proposed.

The four different modes of psychological explanation, and their proper evaluative schemas.

I apply Benjamin's (1941) taxonomy of common scientific "modes of explanation" to the psychological context. I argue that: (i) in a "naming" mode, generalizability is not necessary; (ii) in an "analysis," generalizability is desired; (iii) in a "causal ontology," generalizability is merely one of the means to an end (theory-challenge); (iv) in a "synthesis," generalizability is (eventually) critical. A better appreciation of the diversity in psychologists' modes of explanation is crucial for cogent meta-psychological discussions.

Explanatory profiles of models of consciousness - towards a systematic classification.

Models of consciousness aim to inspire new experimental protocols and aid interpretation of empirical evidence to reveal the structure of conscious experience. Nevertheless, no current model is univocally accepted on either theoretical or empirical grounds. Moreover, a straightforward comparison is difficult for conceptual reasons. In particular, we argue that different models explicitly or implicitly subscribe to different notions of what constitutes a satisfactory explanation, use different tools in their explanatory endeavours and even aim to explain very different phenomena. We thus present a framework to compare existing models in the field with respect to what we call their ‘explanatory profiles’. We focus on the following minimal dimensions: mode of explanation, mechanisms of explanation and target of explanation. We also discuss the empirical consequences of the discussed discrepancies among models. This approach may eventually lead to identifying driving assumptions, theoretical commitments, experimental predictions and a better design of future testing experiments. Finally, our conclusion points to more integrative theoretical research, where axiomatic models may play a critical role in solving current theoretical and experimental contradictions.

Descriptive Economy in the New Weird Short Story: China Miéville’s “The Condition of New Death”

AbstractThis article investigates the forms and functions of description in New Weird fiction, using texts by China Miéville as examples. It contrasts the expansive descriptive routines of his novelPerdido Street Station(2000) with the compact forms of descriptivity found in the short story “The Condition of New Death,” focussing on the role of metaphoric condensation and the blending of description with narrative and explanatory modes. Occasionally drawing on other stories contained in Miéville’s 2015 collectionThree Moments of an Explosion, it formulates a model of the descriptive economy of short fiction.

Representation in Cognitive Science

<i>Representation in Cognitive Science</i>

Making music: Let's not be too quick to abandon the byproduct hypothesis.

It is premature to conclude that music is an adaptation. Given the danger of overextending the adaptationist mode of explanation, the default position should be the byproduct hypothesis, and it should take very strong evidence to drag us into the adaptationist camp. As yet, the evidence isn't strong enough - and the proposed adaptationist explanations have a number of unresolved difficulties.

International origins of Austria-Hungary

This article examines the emergence of Austria-Hungary from the perspective of uneven and combined development (UCD), which unifies social and geopolitical modes of explanation. It argues that UCD can explain the ‘paradoxical’ role of Hungary, a relatively backward society that was at the forefront of the 1848 revolutions and the political reorganisation of the Austrian Empire in 1867. However, it maintains that potentials of UCD have not been realised even in recent UCD interpretations of the Monarchy due to declinist assumptions. The article argues that the international management of UCD via the Concert of Europe inflated Austrian power, but could not prevent sociopolitical change, laying the ground work for its later deflation. The Austrian Empire also faced the challenge of revolutionary Hungary. The article demonstrates that its intersocietally generated peculiarities resulted in the gentry initiating the transition to capitalism to counter the geopolitical threat of industrialising Austria and arrest its social decline. Despite defeating Hungary and introducing capitalist social relations, the strength of Austrian dynasticism prevented the emergence of a hegemonic bloc and political stabilisation. It was this political weakness rather than economic backwardness that might better explain its expulsion from Germany in 1866. The article then turns to a comparison of the political economies of Prussia/Germany and Austria-Hungary and questions the overemphasis on Austro-Hungarian backwardness. By offering a new interpretation of Austria-Hungary, the article contributes to a rethinking of nineteenth century international relations and the long-term causes of World War 1.

Understanding Inequality: Mexican Americans’ Stratification Beliefs

How people understand ethnoracial inequality, or their stratification beliefs, is an important concern for social scientists. Stratification beliefs can be highly influential in the development of individuals’ political attitudes and support for social policies. Despite this, research on stratification beliefs is limited in a number of ways. First, whereas much attention has been given to Whites’, and to some degree Blacks’, stratification beliefs, the attitudes of those in the “racial middle” have been largely neglected, despite their growing demographic presence. Second, much of the literature on stratification beliefs has focused on whether individuals adopt cultural or structural explanations for ethnoracial inequality, with less understanding of how people use a combination of these explanations to interpret inequality. Finally, theoretical and empirical knowledge of stratification beliefs is based largely on survey data. In an attempt to address these gaps, this research draws on interview and supplemental survey data from 70 Mexican Americans to provide an in-depth exploration of their stratification beliefs. The authors pay particular attention to respondents’ use of mixed explanatory modes, illustrating how they draw on cultural and structural discourses to make sense of the world around them. Ultimately, the authors argue that scholars need to pay attention to the interconnections among ideology, everyday experiences, and identity to understand the complexities of stratification beliefs.

Re-Thinking the World with Neutral Monism:Removing the Boundaries Between Mind, Matter, and Spacetime.

Herein we are not interested in merely using dynamical systems theory, graph theory, information theory, etc., to model the relationship between brain dynamics and networks, and various states and degrees of conscious processes. We are interested in the question of how phenomenal conscious experience and fundamental physics are most deeply related. Any attempt to mathematically and formally model conscious experience and its relationship to physics must begin with some metaphysical assumption in mind about the nature of conscious experience, the nature of matter and the nature of the relationship between them. These days the most prominent metaphysical fixed points are strong emergence or some variant of panpsychism. In this paper we will detail another distinct metaphysical starting point known as neutral monism. In particular, we will focus on a variant of the neutral monism of William James and Bertrand Russell. Rather than starting with physics as fundamental, as both strong emergence and panpsychism do in their own way, our goal is to suggest how one might derive fundamental physics from neutral monism. Thus, starting with two axioms grounded in our characterization of neutral monism, we will sketch out a derivation of and explanation for some key features of relativity and quantum mechanics that suggest a unity between those two theories that is generally unappreciated. Our mode of explanation throughout will be of the principle as opposed to constructive variety in something like Einstein’s sense of those terms. We will argue throughout that a bias towards property dualism and a bias toward reductive dynamical and constructive explanation lead to the hard problem and the explanatory gap in consciousness studies, and lead to serious unresolved problems in fundamental physics, such as the measurement problem and the mystery of entanglement in quantum mechanics and lack of progress in producing an empirically well-grounded theory of quantum gravity. We hope to show that given our take on neutral monism and all that follows from it, the aforementioned problems can be satisfactorily resolved leaving us with a far more intuitive and commonsense model of the relationship between conscious experience and physics.

General theory of topological explanations and explanatory asymmetry.

In this paper, I present a general theory of topological explanations, and illustrate its fruitfulness by showing how it accounts for explanatory asymmetry. My argument is developed in three steps. In the first step, I show what it is for some topological property A to explain some physical or dynamical property B. Based on that, I derive three key criteria of successful topological explanations: a criterion concerning the facticity of topological explanations, i.e. what makes it true of a particular system; a criterion for describing counterfactual dependencies in two explanatory modes, i.e. the vertical and the horizontal and, finally, a third perspectival one that tells us when to use the vertical and when to use the horizontal mode. In the second step, I show how this general theory of topological explanations accounts for explanatory asymmetry in both the vertical and horizontal explanatory modes. Finally, in the third step, I argue that this theory is universally applicable across biological sciences, which helps in unifying essential concepts of biological networks. This article is part of the theme issue 'Unifying the essential concepts of biological networks: biological insights and philosophical foundations'.

Digital data and management accounting: why we need to rethink research methods

Digitalisation is having profound effects on how enterprises function. Its impact on accounting research is growing as the rise of the internet, mobile technologies and digital economy tools generate depth, breadth and variety of data that far exceed what researchers have had access to in the past. But whilst social scientists interested in organisational issues are starting to question conventional methodological approaches to the study of contexts where digital data forms are drawn upon, little such concern has been voiced in the management accounting literature. This paper seeks to explore the continued applicability of conventional methodological thinking when carrying out investigations within digital data environments to inform management accounting studies. It considers why digitalisation impacts methodological precepts, identifies how descriptive and explanatory modes of questioning which management accountants have conventionally opted for need rethinking, discusses ways in which digital data characteristics alter what can be drawn from empirical studies, and points to the potential offered within digitalised settings for methodological advance. It concludes by highlighting the necessity, where digitalisation exists, to question modes of posing questions and to reconsider the applicability of methodological precepts deployed by management accounting researchers to date.

Managing Uncertainty, Beckoning Security: Ritual Offerings to a Local Ovoo in Mongolia

ABSTRACT With the demise of the socialist state in 1990, Mongolia was plunged into a process of neoliberal economic reform. The social and economic uncertainty that followed in its wake, combined with recurrent winter calamities, created an escalating vulnerability among the mobile herders. This article brings into focus the revived local offerings to the spirits of the land at ovoos as significant nexuses for managing unpredictable weather phenomena and the contingency of economic hardship, thus providing an exploration of ritual practice as embedded in multifaceted entanglements of lived lives and societal changes. It is argued that an ovoo provide a moment for Mongolian herders to act upon their ability and agency to influence future results. While the ovoo ritual is not in itself characterised by intrinsic ambiguity as a means to, or de facto, produce efficacious outcomes, its ambiguity resides in the explanatory modes that encompass the ritual.

Fear in Hebrew

This article examines Hebrew translations of World War II–era psychology handbooks as means of transmission for scientific knowledge and as a mechanism for the cross-cultural spread of behavioral modernity. While drawing a broad, vivid picture of transnational military mobilities postwar, the article centers on the story of one such handbook: John Dollard’s Fear in Battle, a 1943 self-help guide on combat behavior. Produced in the context of efforts to manage the morale of American troops, Fear in Battle then traveled overseas along with volunteers, mercenaries, and special advisors from the former Allied powers, and played a role in decolonization and nation-building in the Middle East. The article reconstructs each phase of the text’s geopolitical and institutional itinerary: the experimental work on aversive conditioning that led to its writing and the larger neobehaviorist agenda it formed a part of; its function within the United States Army and subsequent transit to Palestine; and its translation into two new versions that circulated among Jewish militia members during the 1948 Palestine War. Analyzing in detail changes in language, style and format, the article thus aims to unpack the process by which behavioral science had been vernacularized and its mode of explanation went global.

Contextual progressive: study of fisheries practices and consequences to the environment

This article aims to explain how to apply the approach to action and consequences with a progressive contextual explanation mode in the study of marine fisheries resource use practices in fishing communities. This approach is part of an effort to develop a critical study of human ecology. The approach with an explanation mode would like to explain empirically and progressively the patterns of fishing practices and the environmental and resource consequences of marine fisheries caused (positive, negative) in the context of their internal and external and historical socio-cultural influences. The approach with explanation mode rejects assumptions from various perspectives of previous anthropological theories which tend to be ideal, essentialist, general and abstract, totalist, and a priori, which are not or less able to see the phenomenon of variation, the role of individuals and parts, processes, openness system, change, temporal and context. Through the application of the approaches and explanatory modes, the complexity of the practices of the various fishing categories of Pulau Sembilan (Sinjai) which are used as illustrations can be understood empirically, contextually, and holistically as they are.