Cognition and Explanation Foreword

Much of human discourse, whether it be in a scientific meeting or in gossip, contains explanations. We all seem to need explanations and want to share them with others. Conversations without any explanatory components would strike us as the most banal sorts of cocktail party banter. Indeed, it has been claimed that those afflicted with Williams Syndrome may have just a deficit, being able to engage in conversations that report facts or follow practiced scripts well, but having much more difficulty creating or following explanations (Carey et al., 1993; Udwin and Yule 1991). It seems that explanations are such a fundamental part of our everyday cognition that their absence in otherwise normal discourse is striking and even suggestive of a neuropsychological deficit. What makes explanation so predominant in human life? What roles do explanations play? How do explanations function in the social world and in the lives of individuals? What is the nature of a good explanation? What is the relationship between explanation and mechanism? Providing explanations seems to be a peculiarly human activity, and understanding them a specifically human ability. But, like other peculiarly human abilities, the most obvious being that of understanding natural language, this ability is not one we are able to deploy at birth, and it is unlikely to emerge wholly anew and be distinct from capacities that other species have. We develop our ability to provide and understand explanations through childhood, but how? What is crucial to this development? Is there always a need for an explanatory component to help organize knowledge even in the youngest child, or is it a later emerging part of knowledge that requires a great deal of prior non-explanatory groundwork? To what extent is the increasing ability to provide and understand explanations a natural part of growth of expertise in a specific domain, as opposed to the development of a domain general capacity? In evolutionary terms, how unique is our ability to provide and understand explanations? If we think that explanations are essentially linguistic, and consider ourselves as the sole linguistic species, then we are likely to think of our abilities here as unique among species, and perhaps inaccessible even to preverbal human infants. But should we think of the tie between explanation and language in this way? Is one a precursor to the other, and, if so, which one and why? If we do think of explanation and language as intimately connected, then what precursors to the emergence of explanatory abilities exist in the rest of the animal kingdom? In what ways are social aspects important to the evolution and development of these