Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In categorical explanation a category label is used to explain an associated property. We show that label entrenchment,whether a label is commonly used by ones community, affects the judged quality of a categorical explanation whetherthe explanation offers substantive information or not. In Experiments 1 and 2, explanations using unentrenched labels arerated as less comprehensive and less natural independent of causal or featural information, even when the label is merely aname for the explanandum. Experiments 3 and 4 replicate the effect with unentrenched labels coined by groups of expertdiscoverers and rule out explanations like familiarity and communicative principles. Most participants in Experiments3 and 4 could not report the impact of entrenchment on their judgments. We argue that reliance on entrenchment arosebecause the community often has useful information. Common use of labels as conduits for this knowledge inducesreliance on community cues even when uninformative.