the mit press explanation and cognition jun 2000

[...]... increase in pressure On the other hand, an increase in the temperature of the gas will cause an increase in the pressure, which will, in turn, cause the gas to expand, moving the piston outward The same mechanism (cylinder, piston, and heat source) that directs the causation from volume to pressure in the first case directs the causation from pressure to volume in the second Expressing the situation... slowly than the size and complexity of the phenomena explained, the theory becomes more testable, and more plausible if successful, as it is extended There is no reason, by the way, for the psychological mechanisms of a unified theory of the mind to stop at the boundaries of cognition Indeed, there are already proposals for extending the unified theories to 28 Simon embrace attention, motivation, and emotion... we will see that the reversal in the direction of causation is determined by taking different variables as exogenously determined In the first case, volume and temperature are the exogenous variables, and, by the gas laws, they causally determine the pressure In the second case, temperature and equilibrium pressure—that is the weight of the piston—are the exogenous variables, whence the same gas laws... is expressed as a function of the planetary distance; whereas in Newton’s, the period of revolution is expressed as a function of the distance, the sun’s mass (the mass of the planet, appearing in both numerator as gravitational mass, and denominator as inertial mass, cancels out), and the gravitational constant The sun’s mass provides the cause for the gravitational attraction, and determines the intensity... then the first observation can be used to determine the voltage, and the remaining observations to test whether its defined value is consistent with the new currents and resistances Ohm’s law combines definition and theory in one, and the same can be shown to be true of many other fundamental laws (e.g., F = ma) Unified Theories In cognitive science, the development of explanatory mechanisms leads in the. .. unified theory, in the sense proposed by Newell (1990) As we move toward a unified theory (whether in the form of Soar, Act-R, or as the kind of combination of EPAM, GPS, and UNDERSTAND that I advocate), we aim to embrace a rapidly growing set of experiments and observations in a gradually larger set of mechanisms As long as the size and the complexity of the theory (in terms of the number of mechanisms and. .. reflects the structure and layering of the phenomena themselves and the mechanisms that produce them Moreover, it leads to a far simpler and more parsimonious body of theory We can see a striking example of this parsimony in the layering of modern genetic theory from population genetics at the most aggregate level, through classical Mendelian genetics at the level of the species and its members, to the. .. observable, and these are absorbed when the descriptive law is deduced from the explanatory one and fitted to the data (For the way theoretical—not directly observable—terms enter into theories and can be eliminated from them in the derivation of descriptive laws, see Simon 1970, 1983.) We will see later that the explanation generally deals with phenomena at a finer temporal resolution than the original... pay, cognitively or aesthetically, for introducing one or more new theoretical terms Laws and Definitions One further comment on the introduction of theoretical terms is in order, as there has been much confusion about it in the literature The same laws that define the theoretical terms can also be used to test the explanatory theory: there is no sharp separation between definitions and laws (Simon 1970)... contemporary theory known as “quantum mechanics.” Relation of Explanatory to Descriptive Theories From a purely phenomenological standpoint, there are no apparent differences between the descriptive theories in these two examples and the corresponding explanatory theories In both kinds of theories, a function connects the values of dependent and independent variables In Kepler’s theory, the period of . seek explanations and what do they accomplish? How central are causes to explanation? These are the questions addressed by Explanation and Cognition, and it is to them that we turn next. 2 Keil and. works, and yet be unable to repeat the explanation to another. Moreover, such failures to repeat the explanation do not seem merely to be a result of forgetting the details of the explanation .The. explanatory goals and standards, and so on, with the domains of explanation being largely autonomous from one another. At the other extreme, we might think that these domains are interdependent and not