Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We offer a computational framework for modeling explanation as cooperative rational communication. Under our framework, when an explainer is faced with a ``why?'' question, they reason about the question-asker's current mental model, and intervene on that mental model in order to maximize the listener's future utility. We instantiate our framework in a planning domain, and show that our framework can model human explanations about plans across a wide variety of scenarios.