Despite the impressive amount of financial resources invested in carrying out large-scale brain simulations, it is controversial what the payoffs are of pursuing this project. The present paper argues that in some cases, from designing, building, and running a large-scale neural simulation, scientists acquire useful knowledge about the computational performance of the simulating system, rather than about the neurobiological system represented in the simulation. What this means, why it is not a trivial lesson, and how it advances the literature on the epistemology of computer simulation are the three preoccupations addressed by the paper

Abductive reasoning assigns special status to the explanatorypower of a hypothesis. But how do people make explana-tory judgments? Our study clarifies this issue by asking: (i)How does the explanatory power of a hypothesis cohere withother cognitive factors? (ii) How does probabilistic informa-tion affect explanatory judgments? In order to answer thesequestions, we conducted an experiment with 671 participants.Their task was to make judgments about a potentially explana-tory hypothesis and its cognitive virtues. In the responses, weisolated three constructs: Explanatory Value, Rational Accept-ability, and Entailment. Explanatory judgments strongly co-hered with judgments of causal relevance and with a sense ofunderstanding. Furthermore, we found that Explanatory Valuewas sensitive to manipulations of statistical relevance relationsbetween hypothesis and evidence, but not to explicit infor-mation about the prior probability of the hypothesis. Theseresults indicate that probabilistic information about statisticalrelevance is a strong determinant of Explanatory Value. Moregenerally, our study suggests that abductive and probabilisticreasoning are two distinct modes of inference.

This study investigates how judgments of explanatory power are affected by (i) the prior credibility of a potential explanation, (ii) the causal framing used to describe the explanation, and (iii) the generalizability of the explanation. We found that the prior credibility of a causal explanation plays a central role in explanatory reasoning: first, because of the presence of strong main effects on judgments of explanatory power, and second, because of the gate-keeping role prior credibility has for other factors. Highly credible explanations were not susceptible to causal framing effects. Instead, highly credible hypotheses were sensitive to the generalizability of an explanation. While these results yield a more nuanced understanding of the determinants of judgments of explanatory power, they also illuminate the close relationship between prior beliefs and explanatory power and the relationship between abductive and probabilistic reasoning.

Tracing the evolutionary milestones of our species has been the focus of much exciting research. Yet, we are still unable to ‘locate' the divergence point of our cognitive evolution, which has made us so unique in the animal kingdom (Tomasello & Rakoczy, 2003). We have identified a gap in our understanding, and that is the absence of a systematic exploration into the symbiotic relationship between Homo sapiens and fungi. This highly interdisciplinary symposium aims to address this oversight, emphasizing the important – yet underappreciated – role of fungi in cognitive contexts and challenge traditional views of cognition.