People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real-time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in Studies 1–6. Then we show differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7–10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies 11 and 12, and discuss the implications of our findings for the roles of intuitive theories in concepts and cognition.

Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called "hypothesis" or "abduction". He characterized abduction as reasoning "from effect to cause", and as "the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis". Peirce's ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning (the method of analysis), have been seen as providing a logic of scientific discovery. Inference to the best explanation (IBE) has been regarded as an important mode of justification, both in everyday life, detective stories, and science. In particular, scientific realism has been defended by an abductive no-miracle argument (Smart, Putnam, Boyd), while the critics of realism have attempted to show that this appeal to abduction is question-begging, circular, or incoherent (Fine, Laudan, van Fraassen). This paper approaches these issues by distinguishing weaker and stronger forms of abduction, and by showing how these types of inferences can be given Peircean and Bayesian probabilistic reconstructions.

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Originally put forward by Smart and Maxwell in the 1960’s, and later revived by Putnam (1975) and Boyd (1984), the no miracle argument for scientific realism has been much discussed. In this paper, I try to repudiate an antirealist charge of circularity on the argument, here further scrutinized through a recent formulation due to Stathis Psillos (1999). Moreover, I attempt to turn the tables around on the anti-realists by arguing that they can hardly be said be able to explain the disheartening historical picture suggested by some of their own arguments, especially the ones pertaining to the famous pessimistic induction. Do electrons exist? After all, nobody has ever touched, tasted, smelled or in any other way been in direct perceptual contact with an electron. So are we at all justified in treating electrons as anything over and above handy logical constructions—as fictions fit for predictions? In a more general form, this kind of question is the springboard for the debate between scientific realists and scientific anti-realists. In the present paper, I will defend scientific realism

Relationship marketing in consumer markets came to the forefront of marketing in the 1990s. However, theory development in this area lags behind applications and prescriptions. We attribute this lack of development, in part, to researchers asking the wrong questions. A case is made for reassessing the epistemological and ontological assumptions about relationships in consumer markets. We argue that humans appear to be genetically predisposed to forming relationships. Instead of concentrating on why consumers seek relationships, researchers should ask, “How do consumers get into relationships with marketing entities? ” The rephrased research question will prove more apt in consumer markets where reality is socially constructed. Finally, we assert that a discovery-oriented phenomenological approach should be adopted to answer the rephrased question.

Abstract The similarity approach stands as a significant attempt to defend scientific realism from the attack of the pessimistic meta-induction. The strategy behind the similarity approach is to shift from an absolute notion of truth to the more flexible one of truthlikeness. Nonetheless, some authors are not satisfied with this attempt to defend realism and find that the notion of truthlikeness is not fully convincing. The aim of this paper is to analyze and understand the reasons of this dissatisfaction. Our thesis is that the dissatisfaction with the notion of truthlikeness concerns the double role that this notion plays within the similarity approach: This notion plays both a regulative role in the conception of theories and a constitutive one in their selection. The similarity approach (Oddie 1986; Niiniluoto 1987) stands as one of the most significant examples of the attempts emerged within the realist epistemology to respond to the challenge of the pessimistic meta-induction (Laudan 1981). A key feature of the similarity approach is a sharp shift in the formulation of the notion of truth. As concisely put by Niiniluoto, the strategy has been to move from ‘‘the strict concept of truth’ ’ to the ‘‘more flexible notions of truthlikeness and approximate truth’ ’ (Niiniluoto 1997, p. 547). 1 After Popper’s unsuccessful attempt (1963), the similarity approach has been intended to provide a systematized conceptualisation of the realist hypothesis that though scientific theories are typically false, their 1 Niiniluoto makes a distinction between truthlikeness and approximate truth (Niiniluoto 1987, 1997,