Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What makes an explanation seem insightful? Prior work shows that even circular explanations can seem insightful when they include information from a lower level of explanation (reductive information). Here, we suggest that this impression of insight is not an illusion. Rather, circular explanations with reductive information are pragmatically instructive: they suggest at which level of description the phenomenon should be explained. In Study 1, even single-sentence circular explanations appeared insightful when infused with reductive information. In Study 2, rating circular explanations with reductive information as insightful correlated with rating them as helpful both with searching for explanatory information and with narrowing down which mechanisms an explanation should address. Study 2 also provides preliminary evidence that these ratings were not driven by prior knowledge of these circular explanations' explicit propositional content.