Adding Why to What? Analyses of an Everyday Explanation

Abstract

AbstractIn XAI it is important to consider that, in contrast to explanations for professional audiences, one cannot assume common expertise when explaining for laypeople. But such explanations between humans vary greatly, making it difficult to research commonalities across explanations. We used the dual nature theory, a techno-philosophical approach, to cope with these challenges. According to it, onan explain, for example, an XAI’s decision by addressing its dual nature: by focusing on the Architecture (e.g., the logic of its algorithms) or the Relevance (e.g., the severity of a decision, the implications of a recommendation). We investigated 20 explanations of games using the theory as an analytical framework. We elaborate how we used the theory to quickly structure and compare explanations of technological artifacts. We supplement results from analyzing the explanation contents with results from a video recall to explore how Explainers (EX) justified their explanation. We found that EX were focusing on the physical aspects of the game first (Architecture) and only later on aspects of the Relevance. Reasoning in the video recalls indicated that EX regarded the focus on the Architecture as important for structuring the explanation initially by explaining the basic components before focusing on more complex, intangible aspects. EX justified shifting between addressing the two sides by explanation goals, emerging misunderstandings, and the knowledge needs of the explainee. We discovered several commonalities that inspire future research questions which, if further generalizable, provide first ideas for the construction of synthetic explanations.