Funded Grants

Knowledge from nowhere: How thinking leads to learning

The human ability to learn is nothing short of remarkable. We learn new things from observing the world around us, and we learn new things from the testimony of others. Perhaps most remarkably of all, we sometimes learn new things simply by thinking. With ingenious thought experiments, Galileo concluded that all objects fall at the same rate, and Einstein argued that light bends in a gravitational field. Their insights were generated without the benefit of grants or graduate students or even laboratories. They were privy to no new empirical data, and had no external informants. They learned something genuinely new, and they did so simply by thinking.

Thought experiments like Galileo's and Einstein's pose the puzzle of how knowledge can (seemingly) come from nowhere: How it is that thinking, in the absence of novel information from the external world, can generate new insights. This kind of learning highlights the exquisite power of the human mind, and challenges most existing theories of learning. An account of learning that can respond to this puzzle requires grappling with one of the hardest problems in human cognition: How our mental representations of the world are structured and change.

Learning by thinking is not restricted to thought experiments in science -- it happens constantly in the course of everyday life. Consider the phenomenon of learning by explaining, in which one gains greater understanding as a result of explaining something to oneself or to others. Like thought experiments, explaining can foster novel insights in the absence of novel data from the external world. Mental simulation, deductive reasoning, and analogical reasoning are other ubiquitous processes that involve learning by thinking.

By tackling conceptually challenging phenomena such as learning by thinking, my research addresses foundational questions about human cognition that shed light on the nature of mental representation and learning. My approach is interdisciplinary, combining the conceptual tools of philosophy and the experimental tools of cognitive psychology, with additional contributions from education and computer science. In past work, for example, I have drawn on philosophical theories of thought experiments and laboratory methods from cognitive and developmental psychology to address the role of explanation in learning. Other projects have examined the role of explanation in inference, causal reasoning, and social cognition, and have likewise benefited from an interdisciplinary approach.

My current work engages the puzzle of how we seem to acquire knowledge from nowhere by examining a host of processes that involve learning by thinking, including learning from thought experiments, from analogies and analogical reasoning, and from fiction. The resulting analyses will lead us to a more complete picture of how people learn and form representations, with theoretical implications for the cognitive sciences and practical implications for education and artificial intelligence.