Explanation and Understanding
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5845019 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Frank C Keil (0000-0003-3688-7558, Yale University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 227-254 |
| Publication date | 2005-08-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Annual Review of Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0066-4308 • E-ISSN: 1545-2085 |
| Publisher | Annual Reviews (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190100 |
| PMID | 16318595 |
| PMCID | PMC3034737 |
| OpenAlex | W2119858020 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 225 |
| References cited | 122 |
The study of explanation, while related to intuitive theories, concepts, and mental models, offers important new perspectives on high-level thought. Explanations sort themselves into several distinct types corresponding to patterns of causation, content domains, and explanatory stances, all of which have cognitive consequences. Although explanations are necessarily incomplete--often dramatically so in laypeople--those gaps are difficult to discern. Despite such gaps and the failure to recognize them fully, people do have skeletal explanatory senses, often implicit, of the causal structure of the world. They further leverage those skeletal understandings by knowing how to access additional explanatory knowledge in other minds and by being particularly adept at using situational support to build explanations on the fly in real time. Across development and cultures, there are differences in preferred explanatory schemes, but rarely are any kinds of schemes completely unavailable to a group
Causation · Explanatory model · Leverage (statistics · Situational ethics · Child and Animal Learning Development · Cognitive Science and Mapping · Language and cultural evolution
Human Goals Are Constitutive of Agency in Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The “Extended Mind” Approach for a New Paradigm of Psychology
Ética Y Dialéctica O Ética Dialéctica
El lugar de la simulación social en arqueología
Mirror neurons and their function in cognitively understood empathy
Testing Turing
La causalité dans la philosophie contemporaine
A refutation of historical materialism
Explanations without causes and causes without reasons
Are researchers in Europe European researchers? A study of doctoral researchers at the University of Luxembourg
The Fate of Western Civilization
The Gale–Pruss cosmological argument
Facing Asymmetry
Cognitive-Developmental and Behavior-Analytic Theories
Between Religion and Science
Escape, Fromm, Freedom
Causality, Action and Effective History. Remarks on Gadamer, von Wright and Others
Explaining Crime as Moral Actions
Russia's European Choice
Socratic Epistemology
Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen
Metatheories, Theories, and Concepts in the Study of Development
Administrative Action and Administrative Behaviour
Five Factor Model of Personality, Personality Disorder
The Inherence Heuristic
Concepts and Semantic Memory
Peirce's Theory of Signs
From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship
Explanation in artificial intelligence
Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies
The inherence heuristic
A pluralist view of generalization in qualitative research
Does discovery-based instruction enhance learning?
Why We Need Qualitative Research in Suicidology
Causal–explanatory pluralism
Argumentation for Learning
What do we want from Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)? – A stakeholder perspective on XAI and a conceptual model guiding interdisciplinary XAI research
Bewitchment, Biology, or Both
The cultural evolution of shamanism
The structure and function of explanations
Definitions, methods, and applications in interpretable machine learning
The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models
Deliberation and Democracy
Aristotle and Beyond
Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy
Shared Minds
Learning Without Lessons
Understanding from Machine Learning Models
Searching the internet for explanations
A Communication‐First Account of Explanation
The use of the iBrainstorm app in a collaborative argumentation-based learning context for developing listening comprehension skills by EFL learners
Psychoanalytic Interpretation as a Research Method for Studying Military Discourse
Intentional Ecology
Methodology and political science
A regularity theory of causality for the social sciences
Understanding the dilemma of explainable artificial intelligence
Knowledge Versus Understanding
Counterfactual thoughts in complex causal domain
The cultural evolution of witchcraft beliefs
Information that matters
How the different explanation classes impact trust calibration
Mechanistic reasoning in biology among elementary school children
What can be learned from laypersons’ scientific practices in everyday life
Understanding Biological Evolution Through Computational Thinking
A Map for the Ontological Crossroads
Managing Wide Plurality Through Metarepresentations
Causal‐mechanical explanations in biology
Evaluating scientific thinking among Shanghai’s students of high and low performing schools
Students’ perceptions of the impacts of peer ideas in inquiry learning
Building compressed causal models of the world
Mind the gap
Explanations in the wild
Epistemic phase transitions in mathematical proofs
The impact of explanations as communicative acts on belief in a claim
Herding cats
Remembering facial age
“It kinda has like a mind”
A counterfactual simulation model of causation by omission
Drawing conclusions
Revisiting the narrow latent scope bias in explanatory reasoning
The Role of Explanation in the Evolution of Technology
Explanatory completeness
The Person at the Core of Psychological Science
Cooperative Human–Robot Planning with Team Reasoning
Realism in One Country
Lay psychology of the hidden mental life
A Taxonomy of Explanation Types and Need Indicators in Human–Agent Collaborations
Dimensions in the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience
The role of prevention-oriented attitudes towards nature in people’s judgment of new applications of genomics techniques in soil ecology
Combining Self-Explaining With Computer Architecture Diagrams to Enhance the Learning of Assembly Language Programming
Theorien, Modelle und Erklärungen. Einige Grundprobleme des soziologischen Theorienvergleichs
Die Erklärungsaufgabe der Soziologie und das Problem der Rationalität
Doing and Knowing
Auf der Suche nach Identität
The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will
Critical theory and social inequality
Subjective Causality and Counterfactuals in the Social Sciences
A Case for Cases
Explanations of Meaningful Actions
Explanation and Cognition
The Essential Child
Concepts
The Big Book of Concepts
Using Language
Coherence in Thought and Action
Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development
Cognition in the Wild
Science, Truth, and Democracy
The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm
Norm theory
The Ontogenesis of Trust
The mismatch between gesture and speech as an index of transitional knowledge
The norm of self-interest.
The simulation heuristic
Homeostasis, Species, and Higher Taxa
Basic objects in natural categories
How (and where) does moral judgment work?
Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age
"How Does It Work?" versus "What Are the Laws?"
Shared scientific thinking in everyday parent‐child activity
Two reasons to abandon the false belief task as a test of theory of mind
Intention, history, and artifact concepts
A Theory of Causal Learning in Children
Flow
Structure‐Mapping
The emotional dog and its rational tail
Logic and Conversation
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Perceptual symbol systems
The psychology of interpersonal relations.
Mind, Language and Reality
The Dappled World
How the Mind Explains Behavior
That’s Life
The Native Mind
On Bullshit
The effects of graduate training on reasoning
Explanation
Common Cause Explanation
Studies in the Logic of Explanation
Thinking about Mechanisms
Rethinking Mechanistic Explanation
The Inference to the Best Explanation
Unskilled and unaware of it
The emergence of children's causal explanations and theories
On increasing the persuasiveness of a low prestige communicator
Fundamentally misunderstanding visual perception
The Pleasures of Uncertainty
The Division of Labour in Society
Social Cognition
Counterfactual thinking
| Unique citing works | 225 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 5,23 |
| Citation span | 1983 - 2026 (44) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 208 |