Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, UK.
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2017 Oct;24(5):1451-1464. doi: 10.3758/s13423-017-1299-3.
A number of philosophers argue for the value of abstraction in explanation. According to these prescriptive theories, an explanation becomes superior when it leaves out details that make no difference to the occurrence of the event one is trying to explain (the explanandum). Abstract explanations are not frugal placeholders for improved, detailed future explanations but are more valuable than their concrete counterparts because they highlight the factors that do the causal work, the factors in the absence of which the explanandum would not occur. We present several experiments that test whether people follow this prescription (i.e., whether people prefer explanations with abstract difference makers over explanations with concrete details and explanations that omit descriptively accurate but causally irrelevant information). Contrary to the prescription, we found a preference for concreteness and detail. Participants rated explanations with concrete details higher than their abstract counterparts and in many cases they did not penalize the presence of causally irrelevant details. Nevertheless, causality still constrained participants' preferences: They downgraded concrete explanations that did not communicate the critical causal properties.
许多哲学家都认为抽象在解释中具有价值。根据这些规范性理论，当一个解释省略了对其试图解释的事件（被解释项）发生没有影响的细节时，它就变得更加优越。抽象解释并不是改进的、详细的未来解释的节省占位符，而是比具体解释更有价值，因为它们突出了起因果作用的因素，没有这些因素，被解释项就不会发生。我们提出了几个实验来检验人们是否遵循这一规则（即，人们是否更喜欢具有抽象差异制造者的解释，而不是具有具体细节和省略描述性准确但因果上不相关信息的解释）。与规则相反，我们发现人们更喜欢具体和细节。参与者对具有具体细节的解释的评价高于抽象解释，在许多情况下，他们不会因因果上不相关的细节的存在而受到惩罚。然而，因果关系仍然限制了参与者的偏好：他们降低了没有传达关键因果属性的具体解释的评级。
