Inferring and Explaining

148 InferrIng and exPlaInIng marble from under the blanket and hides it in a nearby box. Sally returns afer lunch and goes to retrieve hermarble. She goes right to the box and fnds it there! Why? Well, because that’s where themarble is!Te second story begins just as the frst, but things take a turn when Sally returns from lunch. Sally goes straight for the basket and is heartbroken not to fnd her marble under the blanket. Why does she do this? Well, that’s where she remembers putting it before lunch. When shown a puppet version of the begin- ning of the Sally and Ann stories and then asked to predict where Sallywill go to look for hermar- ble, children younger than around four typically predict the box because they know that’s where the marble is. But between four and fve, chil- dren’s predictions dramatically change.Teynow realize that Sally will look in the basket because that’s where she would remember putting it. Why do themore cognitivelymature children simply recognize that the Sally-goes-to-the- basket narrative is signifcantly better than the Sally-goes-to-the-box account?Tey have begun to developwhat is ofen called a “theory of mind.” Teory of mind allows a much more precise and mul- tiperspectival understanding of social event. Because we understand beliefs as the basis for forming desires, goals and intentions, and because we understand the sources of belief, we automatically and efort- lessly track what other might know about a situation and can therefore understand their behavior more fnely. . . . Almost automatically we track what oth- ers can know, and that makes all the diference to our capacity to cooperate or compete. 16 Evenback inhunter-gather times, our human ancestors were very skilled social explainers. Contemporary cognitive science provides a very plausible account of the origins of this skill. [Mind reading] is used by cognitive scientists, inter- changeably with “Teory of Mind,” to describe our ability to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires. . . . Tis adaption must have developed during the “massive neurocognitive evolution” which took place dur- ing the Pleistocene (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago). Te emergence of aTeory of Mind “module” was evo- lution’s answer to the “staggeringly complex challenge faced by our ancestors, who needed to make sense of the behavior of other people in their group, which could include up to 200 individuals.” 17 If this is right, and I certainly think it is, it sug- gests a somewhat surprising inversion in our thinking about explanation. Rather than extrap- olating from the more “basic” notion of a causal explanation to account for our narrative skills, it might actually be that our ability to construct narratives about the behavior and motives of those in our social groups is what leads to the wider ability to construct scientifc or causal narratives in situations where agents are con- spicuously absent. Disagreement But wait a second you may well counter. How can I possibly claim that our skills, both innate and learned, at explaining and making sense of things, are reliable enough foundation for a general logical procedure such as inference to the best explanation or inference to the best narrative? Clearly rival explanations and rival narratives are not just possible but strongly