223 | Tania Lombrozo on What Explanations Are

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2023

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are few human impulses more primal than the desire for explanations. We have expectations concerning what happens, and when what we experience differs from those expectations, we want to know the reason why. There are obvious philosophy questions here: What is an explanation? Do explanations bottom out, or go forever? But there are also psychology questions: What precisely is it that we seek when we demand an explanation? What makes us satisfied with one? Tania Lombrozo is a psychologist who is also conversant with the philosophical side of things. She offers some pretty convincing explanations for why we value explanation so highly.

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Tania Lombrozo received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of psychology at Princeton. Among her awards are the Gittier Award from the American Psychological Foundation, an Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:02.6	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.4	It's very natural when things go wrong, when something is very different than what you
0:08.8	were led to expect it would be to demand an explanation, to ask why is it like this?
0:16.0	What is the reason why the explanation for the state of affairs that you didn't expect?
0:21.0	But what does that mean?
0:22.9	Exactly.
0:23.9	Does an explanation mean some causal connection between one event or another, or is it
0:29.1	a way that the world is?
0:31.2	If you remember back when we talked to Judea Pearl about cause and effect, and Pearl, of
0:36.2	course, is one of the world's experts in teasing out what causes lead to what effects in all
0:41.9	sorts of messy situations in the real world, he claimed that babies spend their time making
0:49.2	causal maps of the world, saying if I poke this, it reacts in this other way.
0:54.8	So what exactly is going on, not just in babies, but in grownups also, when we human beings
1:00.1	construct this image of the world or this model of the world, which says this is an explanation
1:07.2	for this other thing over there.
1:08.8	Well, today's guest is Tony Lombrozo.
1:10.9	She's one of the world's experts in exactly this question.
1:14.2	She's a psychologist at Princeton University and her lab at Princeton is called the Concepts
1:19.5	and Cognition Lab, which I love that as a name.
1:22.4	I would love to work in the Concepts and Cognition Lab where she studies what an explanation is.
1:29.1	What do we mean when we say here's the explanation for that?
	...

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