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Plausibility and Early Theory in Linguistics and Cognitive Science

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Abstract

Various notions of plausibility are used in cognitive science to argue for or against the “goodness of theories.” However, plausibility remains poorly understood and difficult to analyze. We review debates in the philosophy of science on uses of plausibility in the assessment of novel scientific theories as well as recent attempts to formalize, reform, or eliminate specific notions of plausibility. Although these discussions highlight important concerns behind plausibility claims, they fail to identify viable notions of plausibility that are sufficiently different from other criteria of “good theory,” such as prior probability or external coherence. We survey uses of plausibility in linguistics and cognitive science, confirming that plausibility is often a proxy for other criteria of good theory. We argue that the need remains for concepts of plausibility that can be employed to assess the quality of proposals at the early stages of theory development when other criteria are not yet applicable. We identify two such notions: one relating to formal constraints on theories and another capturing initial epistemic consensus, if not necessarily convergence on the truth, about the target system in a community of inquiry. We briefly assess the specificity and added value of these notions of plausibility relative to other criteria for good theory.

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Notes

  1. Some philosophers of science may argue that there should not be any epistemic restrictions on pursuit: all proposals should be treated as equally viable forerunners of success. The concern is that “even the most seemingly trivial pursuitworthiness criterion would have inhibited some of the greatest scientific research programs in history” (Shaw 2022, 110). However, some scientific contexts, so-called “urgent science,” in which there is a practical or moral reason to obtain results within a particular time frame, may demand pursuitworthiness judgments. This is another point of difference between plausibility and pursuitworthiness.

  2. Belief change has been modeled in other frameworks, like AGM (after Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson), but DEL has become popular because of its advantages over AGM. For example, it can account for higher-order beliefs and can be applied in multi-agent scenarios. However, the epistemic and dynamic operators that enrich the DEL framework with enough expressive power to model and reason about agents’ knowledge, beliefs, and actions come at a computational cost (Aucher & Schwarzentruber 2013): for instance, the satisfiability problem for individual agents in Public Announcement Logic (a fragment of DEL) is NP-complete (Lutz 2006). That said, DEL has been successfully used to model a range of problems, for example the complexity of theory of mind reasoning and related issues (e.g., van de Pol et al. 2018; Szymanik & Verbrugge, 2018).

  3. Conversely, to say that for a, world v is no less plausible than world w, we write w ≤a v. If w is strictly more plausible than v for a, we write w >a v; if v is strictly more plausible than w, we write w <a v. If w and v are equally plausible for a, we write w ≃a v (w ≥a v and w ≤a v hold).

  4. This picture is necessarily simplified but can be refined with tools and insights that are already available in the literature. For example, the way scientific communities assess the plausibility of early theories may depend on how the members of such communities are connected among each other. Network epistemology models have shown that well-connected groups tend to arrive at a consensus quicker, but this consensus may not be correct as members can be sharing misleading evidence that might lead the community to settle on poor theory. This phenomenon is known as the “Zollman effect.” Sparsely connected networks are more likely to settle on a consensus closer to the truth (Zollman 2007, 2010, 2013). Moreover, more realistic agents and interactions would need to be posited to model situations where a community is driven (e.g., by economic or other incentives) to converge on hypotheses not compatible with other criteria for good theory.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Language and Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Giosuè Baggio

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

    Aniello De Santo

  3. Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City, Mexico

    Nancy Abigail Nuñez

  4. Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    Nancy Abigail Nuñez

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  1. Giosuè Baggio
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GB, ADS, and NAN conceived and wrote the manuscript.

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Baggio, G., De Santo, A. & Nuñez, N.A. Plausibility and Early Theory in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Comput Brain Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42113-024-00196-7

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