Original Reality Theory
Aa
Scientific Foundations and References
This section brings together external sources and scientific, epistemological, technical, and documentary literature that support or contextualize claims used in the chapters. References are organized by the numbers and titles of the sections they relate to. The theory’s own technical development — formalizations, models, calculations, tests, and derivations — remains in the Technical development section.
2.3 — Depth, Abstraction, and the Limits of Understanding
Supports the discussion of the illusion of explanatory depth. In the experiments, participants’ assessments of their understanding of mechanisms decline when they must explain them in detail. This supports the chapter’s distinction between following an explanation and being able to reconstruct it.
Collins, H.; Evans, R. (2007). Rethinking Expertise. University of Chicago Press.
Provides the conceptual framework distinguishing contributory expertise, which enables technical contributions within a specialty, from interactional expertise, which enables competent engagement with its language without performing its specialized practices. It helps distinguish interdisciplinary integration from technical mastery of a field.
Develops the account of interactional expertise as understanding acquired through immersion in the language of a practice. This competence is more than recognizing terms or reading a clear explanation. The link provides the authors’ 2016 repository version of the article published in 2015.
Hardwig, J. (1985). Epistemic Dependence. The Journal of Philosophy, 82(7), 335–349.
Supports the discussion of epistemic dependence: knowledge may require relying on other people’s findings and expertise without personally reconstructing all the evidence. The chapter draws on this analysis to clarify dependence across specialties and the responsibility to recognize its limits.
Contextualizes the distinction between juxtaposition and interdisciplinary integration. The report examines the combination of knowledge, methods, and perspectives from different fields to investigate problems beyond the scope of a single discipline. Such integration requires meaningful connections, not merely the presence of several disciplines.
Kitcher, P. (1990). The Division of Cognitive Labor. The Journal of Philosophy, 87(1), 5–22.
Examines how distributing effort among researchers and strategies can advance collective knowledge. It supports treating the division of cognitive labor as part of the organization of science rather than simply an individual shortcoming. This is a philosophical analysis using models, not an empirical demonstration of every form of specialization.
Shows that perceptual cues can influence judgments of learning without corresponding gains in memory, supporting the caution about fluency and assessments of one’s own learning. This phenomenon is related to, but not identical with, the illusion of explanatory depth: it concerns memory predictions rather than the ability to explain mechanisms. Its application to reading AI responses in the chapter is a conceptual connection, not a finding from this experiment about AI.
The entire theory on a single pageContinuous reading for people and AI tools.