NPR

You Can Learn From Declaring A Mystery

A new paper suggests that to declare something a mystery isn't just a confession of ignorance: Some of the time, you can learn something important from it, says psychologist Tania Lombrozo.

A new paper by philosophers Dominik Klein and Matteo Colombo, forthcoming in the journal Episteme, defines a mystery as something that cannot be explained.

This definition doesn't stray too far from our everyday usage. The first definition of mystery to appear on a Google search, for example, is "something that is difficult or impossible to understand or explain."

But on Klein and Colombo's view, to declare something a mystery isn't just a confession

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