Noncircular Explanations Research Articles

Can pantheism explain the existence of the universe?

Abstract Many traditional theists maintain that God is the ultimate explanation of the universe, for why anything exists at all. For the traditional theist, only a being who is fundamental and transcendent can provide an ultimate ground and explanation of the universe. This requirement that God transcend the universe in order to ultimately explain it poses a challenge for pantheism, the view that God is numerically identical with the universe. If God is identical with the universe, and God is supposed to be the ultimate explanation of the universe, the result is an instance of circular explanation. And circular explanations are allegedly illegitimate. In this article, I develop two explanatory models in an attempt to show that pantheism is consistent with non-circular explanations of the universe. All else being equal, I argue that pantheism is not explanatorily deficient in comparison to traditional theism.

Children consider informants' explanation quality with their social dominance in seeking novel explanations.

Identifying high-quality causal explanations is key to scientific understanding. This research (N = 202; 50% girls; Mage: 5.82 years; 64% Asian, 33% White, and 3% multiracial; data collected from 2018 to 2024) examined how explanation circularity and informants' social dominance impact children's learning preferences for causal explanations. Raised in a culture valuing circular logic, Chinese children still preferred non-circular explanations and learning from informants providing non-circular explanations (d ≥ 0.50). When informants with non-circular explanations were subordinate to those with circular explanations, Chinese and American children preferred non-circular over circular explanations (d = 1.10), but did not prefer learning new information from either informant. Although children weigh explanation quality over informant dominance when seeking explanations for given questions, they consider both cues when evaluating informants' credibility.

Participation and Law’s Authority

AbstractThis article argues that despite its claim to be most concerned with the nature of law in the generality of cases, legal positivism’s almost exclusive focus on Anglo-American law has prevented the tradition from adequately answering the question of law’s authority. This article argues that much positivist analysis either ignores, or takes for granted, the participation of the local population in the historical development of any given society’s law and legal system. This failing means that positivism, and much of analytical jurisprudence, does not provide a truly general, non-circular explanation of authority that accounts as equally for post-colonial legal systems as it does for the Anglo-American systems with which positivism has been most concerned. I argue that the conceptual inadequacies in the explanations of law and legitimate authority offered by those such as H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz are most clearly exposed by post-colonial cases, such as Nigeria.

Intercorporeity and the first-person plural in Merleau-Ponty

A theory of the first-person plural occupies a unique place in philosophical investigations into intersubjectivity and social cognition. In order for the referent of the first-person plural—“the We”—to come into existence, it seems there must be a shared ground of communicative possibility, but this requires a non-circular explanation of how this ground could be shared in the absence of a pre-existing context of communicative conventions. Margaret Gilbert’s and John Searle’s theories of collective intentionality capture important aspects of the We, but fail to fully account for this shared ground of communicative possibility. This paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intercorporeity helps reconcile the positive aspects of these accounts while also explaining how the genesis of the social world is continuous with perceptual life in general. This enables an account of the first-person plural as dependent on reciprocal communicative interaction (a la Gilbert) without the need to posit a primitive or primordial “we-mode” of consciousness (a la Searle). “Intercorporeity” designates a bodily openness to others that is not fundamentally different in kind from the general style of bodily comportment found in Merleau-Ponty’s rich analyses of perceptual life.

Children\u2019s success at detecting circular explanations and their interest in future learning

These studies explore elementary-school-aged children’s ability to evaluate circular explanations and whether they respond to receiving weak explanations by expressing interest in additional learning. In the first study, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds (n = 53) heard why questions about unfamiliar animals. For each question, they rated the quality of single explanations and later selected the best explanation between pairs of circular and noncircular explanations. When judging single explanations, 8- and 10-year-olds, and to some extent 6-year-olds, provided higher ratings for noncircular explanations compared to circular ones. When selecting between pairs of explanations, all age groups preferred noncircular explanations to circular ones, but older children did so more consistently than 6-year-olds. Children who recognized the weakness of the single circular explanations were more interested in receiving additional information about the question topics. In Study 2, all three age groups (n = 87) provided higher ratings for noncircular explanations compared to circular ones when listening to responses to how questions, but older children showed a greater distinction in their ratings than 6-year-olds. Moreover, the link between recognizing circular explanations as weak and interest in future learning could not be accounted for solely by individual differences in verbal intelligence. These findings illustrate the developmental trajectory of explanation evaluation and support that recognition of weak explanations is linked to interest in future learning across the elementary years. Implications for education are discussed.

Question, Explanation, Follow-Up: A Mechanism for Learning From Others?

This study explored differences in caregiver-child interactions following children's information-seeking questions. Naturalistic speech from thirty-seven 4-year-olds and their caregivers was used to explore children's information-seeking questions, the caregiver's response, and children's subsequent follow-up. Half of the families were low-socioeconomic status (SES) and the other half were mid-SES. Although children across socioeconomic groups asked a similar proportion of questions, mid-SES caregivers offered significantly more explanatory responses to causal questions as well as more noncircular explanations than low-SES caregivers. No differences were found in children's follow-up to responses given to fact-based questions; however, after hearing unsatisfactory responses to causal questions, mid-SES children were significantly more likely to provide their own explanation. Such variability in caregiver-child interaction may have implications for subsequent learning.

Ability of Pre-school and Primary School Children to Assess the Quality of Explanations

Explanations about the surrounding world are of particular significance for children since it is a way for them to learn and cognise the environment. However, Legare (2014) maintains that little is known about the impact of explanations on learning. For the past decade, explanations have been one of the major themes in the studies of cognitive psychology. They aim at answering the key questions: what is the nature of the phenomenon (explanation), what is it composed of, what are its quality criteria, how is it constructed and perceived by children (Lombrozo, 2006). Hence, the aim of the current paper is to explore the ability of pre-school and primary school children to assess the quality of explanations. The aforesaid aim was posed in accordance with the methodology developed by the authors (the methodology was designed with reference to the study of Baum, Danovitch, and Keil (Baum et al., 2008). The research involved 61 children: 20 pre-school children, and 41 primary school children (21 children of the second grade, and 20 children of the fourth grade respectively). The main conclusions of this research are:
 – children’s ability to assess the quality of explanations increases from pre-school age to the second grade of primary school, yet at this period, it remains unchanged (from the second to fourth grade);
 – despite that the ability to assess the quality of explanations on familiar and unfamiliar topics differs in both age groups (pre-school and primary school), the differences are not statistically significant. It has been determined that, assessing explanation on familiar and unfamiliar topics, pre-school children and fourth grade pupils are able to distinguish circular explanations on familiar topics in a more similar way than assessing explanations on unfamiliar topics. Moreover, older primary learners are more precise in assessing explanations on familiar rather than unfamiliar topics;
 – the oldest children (fourth grade learners) choose a noncircular explanation as a better one more knowingly and reasonably. Meanwhile, children of pre-school age and second grade pupils cannot often point out why they have chosen a noncircular explanation;
 – only older children (mostly fourth grade pupils and several second grade learners) are able to recognise and identify the structure of a circular explanation.
 The conducted research provides insights into the ability of small children to assess the acquired information. It is noteworthy that the assessment and creation of explanations is one of the mechanisms of learning and development (Bonawitz et al., 2008; Legare, & Lombrozo, 2014). Hence, their impact is obvious: explanations give a basis for learning, whereas prior knowledge is fundamental for explanations (Williams, & Lombrozo, 2013).

Comment on Paola Palminiello/2. Playing Europe. Critical Remarks on Palminiello's Non-Circular Explanation of the European Monetary System

Comment on Paola Palminiello/2. Playing Europe. Critical Remarks on Palminiello's Non-Circular Explanation of the European Monetary System

An Attempt to Provide a Non-Circular Explanation of Economic Reforms. Elements for a New Individualistic Theory of Institutional Change

An Attempt to Provide a Non-Circular Explanation of Economic Reforms. Elements for a New Individualistic Theory of Institutional Change

Frege's Elucidatory Holism

I argue against the two most influential readings of Frege's methodology in the philosophy of logic. Dummett's “semanticist” reading sees Frege as taking notions associated with semantical content—and in particular, the semantical notion of truth—as primitive and as intelligible independently of their connection to the activity of judgment, inference, and assertion. Against this, the “pragmaticist” reading proposed by Brandom and Ricketts sees Frege as beginning instead from the independent and intuitive grasp that we allegedly have on the latter activity and only then moving on to explain semantical notions in terms of the nature of such acts. Against both readings, I argue, first, that Frege gives clear indication that he takes semantical and pragmatical notions to be equally primitive, such that he would reject the idea that either sort of notion could function as the base for a non-circular explanation of the other. I argue, secondly, that Frege's own method for conveying the significance of these primitive notions—an activity that Frege calls “elucidation”—is, in fact, explicitly circular in nature. Because of this, I conclude that Frege should be read instead as conceiving of our grasp of the semantical and pragmatical dimensions of logic as far more of a holistic enterprise than either reading suggests.

Children’s sensitivity to circular explanations

The ability to evaluate the quality of explanations is an essential part of children’s intellectual growth. Explanations can be faulty in structural ways such as when they are circular. A circular explanation reiterates the question as if it were an explanation rather than providing any new information. Two experiments ( N = 77) examined children’s preferences when faced with circular and noncircular explanations. The results demonstrate that a preference for noncircular explanations is present, albeit in a fragile form, by 5 or 6 years of age and that it appears robustly by 10 years of age. Thus, the ability to evaluate the quality of explanations based on structural grounds appears to develop rapidly during the elementary school years.

On Approaches to Explaining Cardiovascular Reactivity: Toward Explanations that Explain

The control-system mode of analysis proposed by Pavloski for cardiovascular reactivity phenomena is a purposive or teleological form of explanation, because the explicans has purpose as the central term. The problem with such explanations is that they are circular and empty, providing only a rhetorical feeling of understanding, and absence of strong-inference research. The S-O-R approach, which Pavlovski opposes, provides at least the potential for non-circular explanations, provided that the O-related explanatory constructs are specified in normal cause-effect terms so that, in another context, the explicans can also serve as an explicandum, and vice-versa. Pavloski may be right in suggesting that the evidence requires a feedback, "control-system" construct to account for cardiovascular reactivity phenomena (although he is far from having proved this in his paper), but such a view would need to be supplemented by (non-purposive) control-system explanations that really explain in the logical rather than the merely rhetorical sense of that term.

Towards evidentially based, non-circular explanations of human Pavlovian autonomic conditioning as a genuine phenomenon: A realist perspective

Reflecting on the papers of my fellow participants has suggested the following five prescriptions that would, in my view, facilitate our making genuine progress towards more scientifically-based explanations of human Pavlovian autonomic conditioning

Discussion: Quantum Logic and The Lüders Rule

In a recent paper, Michael Friedman and Hilary Putnam argued that the Lüders rule is ad hoc from the point of view of the Copenhagen interpretation but that it receives a natural explanation within realist quantum logic as a probability conditionalization rule. Geoffrey Hellman maintains that quantum logic cannot give a non-circular explanation of the rule, while Jeffrey Bub argues that the rule is not ad hoc within the Copenhagen interpretation. As I see it, all four are wrong. Given that there is to be a projection postulate, there are at least two natural arguments which the Copenhagen advocate can offer on behalf of the Lüders rule, contrary to Friedman and Putnam. However, the argument which Bub offers is not a good one. At the same time, contrary to Hellman, quantum logic really does provide an explanation of the Lüders rule, and one which is superior to that of the Copenhagen account, since it provides an understanding of why there should be a projection postulate at all.