Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We ask questions about everything from why clocks tick towhy the sky is blue. Although people sometimes preferteleological explanations over mechanistic explanations inresponse to ‘why’ questions, why questions are ambiguous–referring either to a ‘how’ question or a ‘for what purpose’question. In this paper, we examine the relation between theseimplicit questions and explanation preferences. First, we askedwhether people have specific expectations regarding ‘why’questions: How do they interpret these ambiguous cases anddoes this vary across domains? Indeed, people have strong,domain-specific expectations that mirror well-documentedexplanation preferences. People also have preferences aboutwhich specific question they would prefer to have answered. Inother words, ‘why’ questions are ambiguous but not treated assuch — and this has consequences for downstream explanationpreferences. We explore these consequences in light of both thephilosophical and psychological literature on explanation.