On Mechanical Explanation.

A fluid mechanical explanation of dark matter

Matter in the universe has become “dark” or “missing” through misconceptions about the fluid mechanics of gravitational structure formation. The linear Jeans (1902, 1929) theory gives vast overestimates (by factors of trillions or more) for the initial condensation mass of baryonic matter, and vast underestimates (by factors of trillions or more) for the initial condensation mass of the non-bar...

On Explanation

The term “explanation” has been widely investigated in different disciplines such as cognitive science, knowledgebased systems, linguistics, philosophy of science, artificial intelligence, and teaching. All these disciplines consider certain aspects of the term and make clear that there is not only one such concept but a variety of concepts. This has as a consequence that there was no common ag...

Constraints on Bayesian Explanation

Introduction The hypothesis that human cognition may be well characterized as a set of Bayesian computations has been the topic of considerable debate over the last two decades. Recently, critics have argued that this hypothesis is either unlikely to be true or otherwise too unconstrained to be particularly useful for explaining cognition (e.g., Bowers & Davis, 2012), whereas proponents have de...

On Explanation-Oriented Data Mining

Explanation Chains: Recommendations by Explanation

Given a set of candidate items, Recommendation by Explanation constructs a justification for recommending each item, in the form of what we call an Explanation Chain, and then recommends those candidates that have the best explanations. By unifying recommendation and explanation, this approach enables us to find relevant recommendations with explanations that have a high degree of both fidelity...