ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses hypothesis about what type of cognitive entity an explanation is and to sketch a model of the cognitive processes involved in the generation and understanding of explanations. It specially focuses on qualitative explanations in everyday life and in elementary science. Evolutionary biology is a rich source of examples of qualitative explanations. The chapter focuses on the cognitive processes involved in generating explanations from already established or inferred relations. Genetic explanations obviously encompass those explanations that are commonly called 'causal' or 'mechanistic' as well as some historical explanations. Intentional explanations are closely related to explanatory inferences generated in the course of reading. A generative relation is a relation that attributes the origin or emergence of some entity Y to some other entity or factor X. The presence of generative relations is the central characteristic that distinguishes explanations from other types of descriptions.
