Explanation as Orgasm (Alison Gopnik)

Alison Gopnik, “Explanation as Orgasm,” Minds and Machines 8, 101–118 (1998). Surfaced by Steven Strogatz, who quoted its hypothesis: explanation is to cognition as orgasm is to reproduction.

Where the text lives. The 1998 journal article is paywalled at Springer. Gopnik expanded it into a book chapter — “Explanation as orgasm and the drive for causal understanding: The evolution, function and phenomenology of the theory-formation system,” in F. Keil & R. Wilson (eds.), Cognition and Explanation (MIT Press, 2000), 299–323 — and hosts that version free on her site. A copy of the chapter is saved in the wiki’s attachments.

The argument

Explanation should be understood as the felt signature of a particular cognitive system — the theory-formation system — which works to uncover the causal structure of the world. It is most visible in children and in scientists, but runs in everyday thinking too. Because uncovering causes often requires acting on the world (experiment for scientists, play for children), the system comes with a “theory drive”: a motivation to read new evidence through existing theories and to revise theories when evidence demands it. What we experience as “explanation” — the satisfying aha — is the phenomenological state that accompanies satisfying that drive.

That is the orgasm analogy: the pleasure is not the function, but it makes the functional activity (theory-building, like reproduction) something we seek out. And the link between the feeling and the system is contingent — the feeling can fire without real understanding, as with sexual or visual experience — yet a distinctive explanatory phenomenology can also help identify when the theory-formation system is at work. The paper opens with Hobbes on the “lust of the mind” that outlasts carnal pleasure.

Connections

• Curiosity — Gopnik’s theory drive is a mechanistic account of it.
• Explanation as Orgasm, by… (tweet) — where Kyle found it.