The Feasibility of Folk Science

If folk science means individuals having well worked out mechanistic theories of the workings of the world, then it is not feasible. Lay people's explanatory understandings are remarkably coarse, full of gaps and often full of inconsistencies. Even worse, most people underestimate their own understandings. Yet, recent views suggest that formal scientists may not be so different. In spite of these limitations, science somehow works and its success offers hope for the feasibility of folk science as well. The success of science arises from the ways in which scientists learn to leverage understandings in other minds and to outsource explanatory work through sophisticated methods of deference and simplification of complex systems. Three studies ask whether analogous processes might be present not only in lay people, but also in young children and thereby form a foundation for supplementing explanatory understandings almost from the start of our first attempts to make sense of the world.