Are formal explanations mere placeholders or pointers?

Abstract

Formal explanations - explanations that explain properties of a thing by reference to what the thing is, for example, Fido has four legs because he is a dog, appear to be tautological and have led researchers to ask why they are produced. One proposal is that they function as placeholders or pointers to explanations. According to the Placeholders and Pointers as Additional Functions (PPAF) hypothesis, formal explanations are explanatory in and of themselves, and the placeholder and pointer functions are additional functions of formal explanations. In contrast, the Merely Placeholders and Pointers (MPP) hypothesis holds that formal explanations are not explanatory in and of themselves but are placeholders for, or pointers to, explanatory structures. Four experiments compared formal explanations to responses that are uncontroversially tautological and to responses that uncontroversially serve as placeholders for inherent explanations without providing an explanation. The results suggest that formal explanations are not understood to be tautologies, and that, unlike inherent explanation placeholders, formal explanations are selective in the features they target, and apply across content domains. These results are consistent with the PPAF and suggest that formal explanations involve a mode of explanation that is distinct from the mode of explanation involved in inherent explanation. Implications for conceptual representation are discussed.

Keywords: Formal explanations; Kind representations; Modes of explanation.