Tania Lombrozo

**Please visit my new departmental and lab webpages at Berkeley.**

 I'm currently finishing my PhD in psychology at Harvard University, working with Susan Carey. As of this summer I will join the faculty in the psychology department at Berkeley.

My primary interests are in high-level cognition, which roughly translates to "cognitive processes we don't understand well enough to label more precisely." When no one's looking, I pretend to be a philosopher of science.

... illusions ... cv (pdf) ... intellectual graffiti? ... cognitive science humor ... vegan baking ...

More concretely, I'm interested in the structure of conceptual knowledge and how it changes through time. Several people have noted a parallel between scientific development within communities and conceptual change within individuals. I'm interested in exploring this parallel by applying conceptual machinery developed within philosophy of science as a tool to understand human cognition. The flip side of this project is to consider the implications of empirical work for philosophy of science.

So far my research has focused on causal explanation. The question of what constitutes a good explanation has generated an enormous literature within philosophy of science, but relatively little is known about how people judge explanations in everyday contexts. I'm interested in understanding people's everyday explanatory intuitions, and what they can tell us about learning and the representation of conceptual knowledge. Questions I'm interested in include:

  • What is the role of explanation in conceptual representation? Some people have suggested that explanations are the "glue" that bind category members into a coherent concept. If so, how do they do this, and what's the relevant sense of explanation?

  • What is the relationship between explanation and probability? Does the process of generating possible explanations play an important role in estimating probabilities? If so, how?

  • Why is it that we understand something better as a result of explaining it to someone else? When someone else explains something, it's obvious what we've acquired: new knowledge. Yet when we explain something to someone else, we just reorganize knowledge we already possess. How and why does this contribute to a sense of understanding?

    While these are some of the questions that motivate my research, the topics I've addressed are more specific and crosscut these issues. In particular, I've considered the conditions under which people accept teleological explanations, and how we tradeoff simplicity and probability in choosing between competing explanations. My current projects involve generality in explanation, high and low probabilities in explanations, the relationship between explanations and arguments, adaptationist explanations in biology, and moral reasoning about animals.