Comparing Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Power

Abstract

Recently, in attempting to account for explanatory reasoning in probabilistic terms, Bayesians have proposed several measures of the strength of a potential explanation. These candidate measures of “explanatory power” arguably have interesting normative interpretations and consequences. What has not yet been investigated, however, is whether any of these measures are also descriptive of people's actual explanatory judgments. Here I present my own experimental work investigating this question. I argue that one measure in particular is an accurate descriptor of explanatory judgments. Then I briefly point to some implications of this result for the epistemology and the psychology of explanatory reasoning.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 49 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.