Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children exhibit sophisticated explanatory judgments: they expect, value, and judge explanations of salient facts. Do children also believe that everything must have an explanation? If so, they would exhibit a metaphysical explanatory judgment conforming to what philosophers have called the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). In this study, 6-9-year-old children (N = 80, Mage = 7.92, SDage = 1.21) were shown statements across domains (Psychology, Biology, Nature, Physics, Religion, and Supernatural) and asked if they agree that each statement must have an explanation. As a foil, children were also asked about coincidences, which, putatively, aren’t apt for explanation. Indeed, children conform to the PSR: children of all ages believed that the statements must have an explanation. Notably, 7-9-year-olds thought coincidences don’t have to have an explanation, while 6-year-olds didn’t differ between the statements and coincidences. This is the first step at uncovering a developmental change in our metaphysical explanatory judgments.