| Popis: |
Parallel research programs across decades have developed contrasting accounts of people’s explanation preferences. One perspective emphasizes adults’ and children’s preferences for teleological explanations (i.e., explanations referring to something’s purpose), even in direct contrast with mechanistic (or causal) explanations. The other perspective highlights contexts where people instead seek out mechanistic knowledge and judge it to be particularly valuable. These characterizations of people’s explanation preferences support fundamentally different theories of people’s intrinsic worldviews: People may either be irrational and prone to unscientific explanation, or relatively sophisticated investigators of the world around them. How can these teleo-centric and mech-centric views of explanation preferences be reconciled? Here, we demonstrate that mechanistic explanations are comprised of two significant subtypes of explanation. Etiological mechanisms address how things came to be, whereas constitutive mechanisms address how they currently work. In Experiments 1 and 2, we find that people prefer constitutive mechanisms to etiological mechanisms. In Experiments 3, 4a, and 4b, we also find that constitutive and etiological mechanisms are judged differently against teleological explanations. In general, constitutive mechanisms perform better against teleological explanations than etiological mechanisms. Thus, people’s preferences depend on the type of mechanism involved; they may prefer teleology to one kind of mechanism but not to the other. We discuss implications for the larger debate on explanation preferences. |
