Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Formal explanations are not tautological per se and do have explanatory power, although circular explanations can mimic them by emulating their form. (e.g., "This atom possesses an electric charge because it is an ion."). We explored the possibility of enhancing the capacity to detect circular formal explanations by pre-activating participants' prior knowledge of definitions for relevant terms. In Experiment 1, we posed questions about definitions (e.g., What is the best definition for "ion?") immediately before asking participants to evaluate the satisfactoriness of the explanation. In Experiments 2, we directly provided definitions of the terms. Across both experiments, participants consistently rating such explanations as more satisfactory compared to explicitly circular explanations (e.g., "This atom possesses an electric charge because it is an electrically charged atom"). Furthermore, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the effect is not dependent on individuals' ability to select the correct definition of a term.