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  1. Inference to the Best Explanation and the Screening-Off Challenge.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2019 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 38:121-142.
    We argue in Roche and Sober (2013) that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in that Pr(H | O&EXPL) = Pr(H | O), where H is a hypothesis, O is an observation, and EXPL is the proposition that if H and O were true, then H would explain O. This is a “screening-off” thesis. Here we clarify that thesis, reply to criticisms advanced by Lange (2017), consider alternative formulations of Inference to the Best Explanation, discuss a strengthened screening-off thesis, and consider how (...)
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  • The Basis of Debasing Scepticism.Joe Cunningham - 2021 - Erkenntnis 86 (4):813-833.
    This paper purports to provide a fresh cashing out of Debasing Scepticism: the type of Scepticism put on the map in a recent article by Jonathan Schaffer, with a view to demonstrating that the Debasing Sceptic’s argument is not so easily dismissed as many of Schaffer’s commentators have thought. After defending the very possibility of the Debasing Sceptic’s favoured sceptical scenario, I lay out a framework for thinking of the agent’s power to hold their beliefs in the light of reasons (...)
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  • Abduction versus conceiving in modal epistemology.Stephen Biggs & Jessica Wilson - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 8):2045-2076.
    How should modal reasoning proceed? Here we compare abduction-based and conceiving-based modal epistemologies, and argue that an abduction-based approach is preferable, and by a wide margin.
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  • The Perils of Parsimony.William Roche - 2018 - Journal of Philosophy 115 (9):485-505.
    It is widely thought in philosophy and elsewhere that parsimony is a theoretical virtue in that if T1 is more parsimonious than T2, then T1 is preferable to T2, other things being equal. This thesis admits of many distinct precisifications. I focus on a relatively weak precisification on which preferability is a matter of probability, and argue that it is false. This is problematic for various alternative precisifications, and even for Inference to the Best Explanation as standardly understood.
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  • Systematizing the theoretical virtues.Michael N. Keas - 2017 - Synthese 1 (6):1-33.
    There are at least twelve major virtues of good theories: evidential accuracy, causal adequacy, explanatory depth, internal consistency, internal coherence, universal coherence, beauty, simplicity, unification, durability, fruitfulness, and applicability. These virtues are best classified into four classes: evidential, coherential, aesthetic, and diachronic. Each virtue class contains at least three virtues that sequentially follow a repeating pattern of progressive disclosure and expansion. Systematizing the theoretical virtues in this manner clarifies each virtue and suggests how they might have a coordinated and cumulative (...)
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  • In Defense of Rationalism about Abductive Inference.Ali Hasan - 2017 - In Kevin McCain & Ted Poston (eds.), Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    Laurence BonJour and more recently James Beebe have argued that the best way to defend the claim that abduction or inference to the best explanation is epistemically justified is the rationalist view that it is justified a priori. However, rationalism about abduction faces a number of challenges. This chapter focuses on one particular, highly influential objection, that there is no interpretation of probability available which is compatible with rationalism about abduction. The rationalist who wants to maintain a strong connection between (...)
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  • Explanation and the Nature of Scientific Knowledge.Kevin McCain - 2015 - Science & Education 24 (7-8):827-854.
    Explaining phenomena is a primary goal of science. Consequently, it is unsurprising that gaining a proper understanding of the nature of explanation is an important goal of science education. In order to properly understand explanation, however, it is not enough to simply consider theories of the nature of explanation. Properly understanding explanation requires grasping the relation between explanation and understanding, as well as how explanations can lead to scientific knowledge. This article examines the nature of explanation, its relation to understanding, (...)
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  • In Defense of the Explanationist Response to Skepticism.Kevin McCain - 2019 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 9 (1):38-50.
    _ Source: _Page Count 13 A promising response to the threat of external world skepticism involves arguing that our commonsense view of the world best explains the sensory experiences that we have. Since our commonsense view of the world best explains our evidence, we are justified in accepting this commonsense view of the world. Despite the plausibility of this Explanationist Response, it has recently come under attack. James Beebe has argued that only a version of the Explanationist Response that provides (...)
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  • What’s so bad about scientism?Moti Mizrahi - 2017 - Social Epistemology 31 (4):351-367.
    In their attempt to defend philosophy from accusations of uselessness made by prominent scientists, such as Stephen Hawking, some philosophers respond with the charge of ‘scientism.’ This charge makes endorsing a scientistic stance, a mistake by definition. For this reason, it begs the question against these critics of philosophy, or anyone who is inclined to endorse a scientistic stance, and turns the scientism debate into a verbal dispute. In this paper, I propose a different definition of scientism, and thus a (...)
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  • Reactionary responses to the Bad Lot Objection.Finnur Dellsén - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 61:32-40.
    As it is standardly conceived, Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is a form of ampliative inference in which one infers a hypothesis because it provides a better potential explanation of one’s evidence than any other available, competing explanatory hypothesis. Bas van Fraassen famously objected to IBE thus formulated that we may have no reason to think that any of the available, competing explanatory hypotheses are true. While revisionary responses to the Bad Lot Objection concede that IBE needs to be (...)
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  • The a priority of abduction.Stephen Biggs & Jessica Wilson - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (3):735-758.
    Here we challenge the orthodoxy according to which abduction is an a posteriori mode of inference. We start by providing a case study illustrating how abduction can justify a philosophical claim not justifiable by empirical evidence alone. While many grant abduction's epistemic value, nearly all assume that abductive justification is a posteriori, on grounds that our belief in abduction's epistemic value depends on empirical evidence about how the world contingently is. Contra this assumption, we argue, first, that our belief in (...)
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  • Skepticism and Elegance.Kevin McCain - 2016 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (1):30-43.
    _ Source: _Page Count 14 Jonathan Vogel has argued in support of an explanationist response to skepticism in several works. Central to this explanationist response is the fact that our non-skeptical view of the world is a better explanation of our experiences than its skeptical rivals. Despite the plausibility of this response to skepticism, it is not without its critics. Recently, Matthew Gifford has argued that Vogel’s response has problems on two fronts. First, Gifford argues that Vogel’s strategy for showing (...)
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  • Occam’s Razor, Dogmatism, Skepticism, and Skeptical Dogmatism.Mark Walker - 2016 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (1):1-29.
    _ Source: _Page Count 29 Underdetermination arguments for skepticism maintain that our common sense view of the external world is no better, evidentially speaking, than some skeptical competitors. An important and well-known response by dogmatists, those who believe our commonsense view is justified, appeals to abduction or inference to the best explanation. The predominant version of this strategy, going back at least to Locke, invokes Occam’s razor: dogmatists claim the common sense view is simpler than any of its skeptical alternatives (...)
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  • The debasing demon.J. Schaffer - 2010 - Analysis 70 (2):228-237.
    What knowledge is imperilled by sceptical doubt? That is, what range of beliefs may be called into doubt by sceptical nightmares like the Cartesian demon hypothesis? It is generally thought that demons have limited powers, perhaps only threatening a posteriori knowledge of the external world, but at any rate not threatening principles like the cogito. I will argue that there is a demon – the debasing demon – with unlimited powers, which threatens universal doubt. Rather than deceiving us with falsities, (...)
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  • Underdetermination Skepticism and Skeptical Dogmatism.Mark Walker - 2015 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 5 (3):218-251.
    The Mundane World Hypothesis (mwh) says that we have material bodies, we have brains located inside our bodies, we have sense organs which process visual information, the direct cause of our perceptual judgments is typically macroscopic material objects, and we live in a material world. Skeptics using underdetermination arguments arguemwhhas no more epistemic merit than some skeptical competitor, e.g., that we are in the Matrix. Since such competitor hypotheses are equipollent, we are not justified in believingmwh. This paper takes the (...)
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  • Serious theories and skeptical theories: Why you are probably not a brain in a vat.Michael Huemer - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (4):1031-1052.
    Skeptical hypotheses such as the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis provide extremely poor explanations for our sensory experiences. Because these scenarios accommodate virtually any possible set of evidence, the probability of any given set of evidence on the skeptical scenario is near zero; hence, on Bayesian grounds, the scenario is not well supported by the evidence. By contrast, serious theories make reasonably specific predictions about the evidence and are then well supported when these predictions are satisfied.
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  • The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness.Uriah Kriegel (ed.) - 2020 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness provides the most comprehensive overview of current philosophical research on consciousness. Featuring contributions from some of the most prominent experts in the field, it explores the wide range of types of consciousness there may be, the many psychological phenomena with which consciousness interacts, and the various views concerning the ultimate relationship between consciousness and physical reality. It is an essential and authoritative resource for anyone working in philosophy of mind or interested in (...)
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  • Skeptical Thoughts Concerning Explanationism and Skepticism.Clayton Littlejohn - 2014 - Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 1 (1):77-87.
    According to the explanationist, we can rely on inference to best explanation to justifiably believe familiar skeptical hypotheses are false. On this view, commonsense beliefs about the existence and character of familiar, medium-sized dry goods provides the best explanation of our evidence and so justifies our belief that we're not brains-in-vats. This explanationist approach seems prima facie plausible until we press the explanationist to tell us what the data is that we're trying to explain by appeal to our beliefs about (...)
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  • Explanationist evidentialism.Kevin McCain - 2013 - Episteme 10 (3):299-315.
    In their most recent co-authored work, Conee and Feldman (2008) suggest that epistemic support should be understood in terms of best explanations. Although this suggestion is plausible, Conee and Feldman admit that they have not provided the necessary details for a complete account of epistemic support. This article offers an explanationist account of epistemic support of the kind that Conee and Feldman suggest. It is argued that this account of epistemic support yields the intuitively correct results in a wide variety (...)
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  • Global Scepticism, Underdetermination and Metaphysical Possibility.Luca Moretti - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (2):381-403.
    I focus on a key argument for global external world scepticism resting on the underdetermination thesis: the argument according to which we cannot know any proposition about our physical environment because sense evidence for it equally justifies some sceptical alternative (e.g. the Cartesian demon conjecture). I contend that the underdetermination argument can go through only if the controversial thesis that conceivability is per se a source of evidence for metaphysical possibility is true. I also suggest a reason to doubt that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Objective Bayesianism and the Abductivist Response to Scepticism.Darren Bradley - 2024 - Episteme 21 (1):64-78.
    An important line of response to scepticism appeals to the best explanation. But anti-sceptics have not engaged much with work on explanation in the philosophy of science. I plan to investigate whether plausible assumptions about best explanations really do favour anti-scepticism. I will argue that there are ways of constructing sceptical hypotheses in which the assumptions do favour anti-scepticism, but the size of the support for anti-scepticism is small.
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  • The Weirdness of the World.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2024 - Princeton University Press.
    How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental (...)
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  • Dogmatism, Seemings, and Non-Deductive Inferential Justification.Dimitria Gatzia & Berit Brogaard - 2023 - In Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford & Matthias Steup (eds.), Seemings: New Arguments, New Angles. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. Chapter 8.
    Dogmatism holds that an experience or seeming that p can provide prima facie immediate justification for believing p in virtue of its phenomenology. Dogmatism about perceptual justification has appealed primarily to proponents of representational theories of perceptual experience. Call dogmatism that takes perceptual experience to be representational "representational phenomenal dogmatism." As we show, phenomenal seemings play a crucial role in dogmatism of this kind. Despite its conventional appeal to representational theorists, dogmatism is not by definition committed to any particular view (...)
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  • The Sense-Data Language and External World Skepticism.Jared Warren - 2024 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol 4. Oxford University Press.
    We face reality presented with the data of conscious experience and nothing else. The project of early modern philosophy was to build a complete theory of the world from this starting point, with no cheating. Crucial to this starting point is the data of conscious sensory experience – sense data. Attempts to avoid this project often argue that the very idea of sense data is confused. But the sense-data way of talking, the sense-data language, can be freed from every blemish (...)
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  • External world scepticism and self scepticism.Joshua Rowan Thorpe - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (2):591-607.
    A general trend in recent philosophical and empirical work aims to undermine various traditional claims regarding the distinctive nature of self-knowledge. So far, however, this work has not seriously threatened the Cartesian claim that (at least some) self-knowledge is immune to the sort of sceptical problem that seems to afflict our knowledge of the external world. In this paper I carry this trend further by arguing that the Cartesian claim is false. This is done by showing that a familiar sceptical (...)
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  • Dogmatism and Ampliative Inference.Berit Brogaard - 2021 - Veritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 66 (1):e42186.
    The evidential role of experience in justifying beliefs has been at the center of debate in philosophy in recent years. One view is that experience, or seeming, can confer immediate justification on belief in virtue of its representational phenomenology. Call this view “representational dogmatism.” Another view is that experience confers immediate justification on belief in virtue of its relational phenomenology. Call this view “relational dogmatism.” The goal of this paper is to pit these two versions of dogmatism against each other (...)
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  • Non-Human Animals Feel Pain in a Morally Relevant Sense.James Simpson - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (1):329-336.
    In a recent article in this journal, Calum Miller skillfully and creatively argues for the counterintuitive view that there aren’t any good reasons to believe that non-human animals feel pain in a morally relevant sense. By Miller’s lights, such reasons are either weak in their own right or they also favor the view that non-human animals don’t feel morally relevant pain. In this paper, I explain why Miller’s view is mistaken. In particular, I sketch a very reasonable abductive argument for (...)
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  • Does anti-exceptionalism about logic entail that logic is a posteriori?Jessica M. Wilson & Stephen Biggs - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-17.
    The debate between exceptionalists and anti-exceptionalists about logic is often framed as concerning whether the justification of logical theories is a priori or a posteriori (for short: whether logic is a priori or a posteriori). As we substantiate (S1), this framing more deeply encodes the usual anti-exceptionalist thesis that logical theories, like scientific theories, are abductively justified, coupled with the common supposition that abduction is an a posteriori mode of inference, in the sense that the epistemic value of abduction is (...)
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  • Rationalist Resistance to Disagreement-Motivated Religious Skepticism.John Pittard - 2021 - In Matthew A. Benton & Jonathan L. Kvanvig (eds.), Religious Disagreement and Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 180-216.
    Many epistemologists argue that responses to disagreement should exhibit a certain kind of epistemic impartiality. “Strong conciliationists” claim that we ought to give equal weight to the views of those who, judged from a dispute-neutral perspective, appear to be our “epistemic peers” with respect to some disputed matter. Using a Bayesian framework, Chapter 8 considers whether there is a plausible epistemic impartiality principle that would require us to give up confident religious (or irreligious) belief in favor of religious skepticism. It (...)
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  • Quantum correlations and the explanatory power of radical metaphysical hypotheses.Nina Emery - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (7):2391-2414.
    I argue that, in at least one important sense, the hypothesis that you are a brain in a vat provides better explanations than the explanations provided by standard ways of interpreting our best scientific theories. This puts pressure on anyone who—like me!—wishes to resist taking this radical hypothesis seriously when doing science and scientifically-informed metaphysics. Insofar as our resistance is justified, it can’t be justified simply by claiming that the brain in a vast hypothesis is explanatorily impoverished.
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  • An epistemological problem for minimalist views about composition.Dean Da Vee - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9649-9668.
    Some philosophers accept what I call minimalist views about composition. They either deny that composition ever occurs, or they only allow that composition occurs when some things are taken up into a life. While minimalists often take their views to be somewhat revisionary, they usually want to distinguish their views from truly radical views such as the view that there is no external world at all. They often do this by noting that, although they don’t believe that there are tables, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Objective Bayesianism and the Abductivist Response to Scepticism.Darren Bradley - 2021 - Episteme 1:1-15.
    An important line of response to scepticism appeals to the best explanation. But anti-sceptics have not engaged much with work on explanation in the philosophy of science. I plan to investigate whether plausible assumptions about best explanations really do favour anti-scepticism. I will argue that there are ways of constructing sceptical hypotheses in which the assumptions do favour anti-scepticism, but the size of the support for anti-scepticism is small.
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  • A Modest Argument Against Scepticism.Tobies Grimaltos Mascaros & Carlos J. Moya Espí - 2020 - Quaderns de Filosofia 7 (1):33-43.
    In this paper we don’t intend to show, against the sceptic, that most of our everyday beliefs about the external world are cases of knowledge. What we do try to show is that it is more rational to hold that most of such beliefs are actually cases of knowledge than to deny them this status, as the external world sceptic does. In some sense, our point of view is the opposite of Hume’s, who held that reason clearly favours scepticism about (...)
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  • Explanatory Consolidation: From ‘Best’ to ‘Good Enough’.Finnur Dellsén - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (1):157-177.
    In science and everyday life, we often infer that something is true because it would explain some set of facts better than any other hypothesis we can think of. But what if we have reason to believe that there is a better way to explain these facts that we just haven't thought of? Wouldn't that undermine our warrant for believing the best available explanation? Many philosophers have assumed that we can solve such underconsideration problems by stipulating that a hypothesis should (...)
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  • Does IBE Require a ‘Model’ of Explanation?Frank Cabrera - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (2):727-750.
    In this article, I consider an important challenge to the popular theory of scientific inference commonly known as ‘inference to the best explanation’, one that has received scant attention.1 1 The problem is that there exists a wide array of rival models of explanation, thus leaving IBE objectionably indeterminate. First, I briefly introduce IBE. Then, I motivate the problem and offer three potential solutions, the most plausible of which is to adopt a kind of pluralism about the rival models of (...)
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  • Does Skepticism Presuppose Explanationism?James R. Beebe - 2017 - In Kevin McCain & Ted Poston (eds.), Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 173-187.
    A common response to radical skeptical challenges to our knowledge of the external world has been that there are explanatory reasons (e.g., simplicity, coherence, explanatory power, conservatism) for favoring commonsense explanations of our sensory experiences over skeptical explanations. Despite the degree of visibility this class of response has enjoyed, it has often been viewed with skepticism [sic] by the epistemological community because of concerns about the epistemic merits of explanatory reasoning. I argue that skeptical challenges that employ skeptical hypotheses presuppose (...)
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  • Value beyond truth-value: a practical response to skepticism.Miriam Schleifer McCormick - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8601-8619.
    I aim to offer a practical response to skepticism. I begin by surveying a family of responses to skepticism that I term “dogmatic” and argue that they are problematically evasive; they do not address what I take to be a question that is central to many skeptics: Why am I justified in maintaining some beliefs that fail to meet ordinary standards of doxastic evaluation? I then turn to a discussion of these standards of evaluation and to the different kinds of (...)
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  • A review of 'Theoretical virtues in science' by S. Schindler. [REVIEW]Darren Bradley - 2019 - Metascience 28 (2):261-264.
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  • Experimental Evidence for the Existence of an External World.Eric Schwitzgebel & Alan T. Moore - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3):564--582.
    In the first experiment, I exhibit unreliable judgment about the primeness or divisibility of four-digit numbers, in contrast to a seeming Excel program. In the second experiment, I exhibit an imperfect memory for arbitrary-seeming three-digit number and letter combinations, in contrast to my seeming collaborator with seemingly hidden notes. In the third experiment, I seem to suffer repeated defeats at chess. In all three experiments, the most straightforward interpretation of the experiential evidence is that something exists in the universe that (...)
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  • The coherence objection to dream scepticism.Krasimira Filcheva - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (4):409-421.
    The dream sceptic argues that our ordinary beliefs are not justified because we cannot know that we have not always been dreaming. This is the Always Dreaming Hypothesis (ADH). I develop the traditional coherence objection to dream scepticism and argue that the coherence objection can be reformulated in a way that makes it both plausible and defensible. Considerations about the incoherence of dreams can be given probabilistic expression in a way that shows ADH to be highly improbable. Given the evidence (...)
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  • Contrastive Hinge Epistemology.Giorgio Volpe - 2021 - Theoria 87 (5):1222-1249.
    In this paper I outline an account of the structure of perceptual justification that develops Wittgenstein’s thought that the possibility of acquiring any degree of justification for our beliefs depends on placing certain propositions outside the route of empirical inquiry, turning them into the ‘hinges’ of our rational evaluations. The proposal is akin to ‘moderate’ accounts of the structure of perceptual justification, but it conjoins Wittgenstein’s insight with explanationist and contrastivist ideas, and so differs in important respects both from such (...)
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  • Inference to the best explanation and the challenge of skepticism.Bryan C. Appley - unknown
    In this dissertation I consider the problem of external world skepticism and attempts at providing an argument to the best explanation against it. In chapter one I consider several different ways of formulating the crucial skeptical argument, settling on an argument that centers on the question of whether we're justified in believing propositions about the external world. I then consider and reject several options for getting around this issue which I take to be inadequate. I finally conclude that the best (...)
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  • How you know you are not a brain in a vat.Alexander Jackson - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2799-2822.
    A sensible epistemologist may not see how she could know that she is not a brain in a vat ; but she doesn’t panic. She sticks with her empirical beliefs, and as that requires, believes that she is not a BIV. (She does not inferentially base her belief that she is not a BIV on her empirical knowledge—she rejects that ‘Moorean’ response to skepticism.) Drawing on the psychological literature on metacognition, I describe a mechanism that’s plausibly responsible for a sensible (...)
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  • BonJour on explanation and skepticism.Jonathan Vogel - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (4):413-421.
    Laurence BonJour, among others, has argued that inference to the best explanation allows us to reject skeptical hypotheses in favor of our common-sense view of the world. BonJour considers several skeptical hypotheses, specifically: our experiences arise by mere chance, uncaused; the simple hypothesis which states merely that our experiences are caused unveridically; and an elaborated hypothesis which explains in detail how our unveridical experiences are brought about. A central issue is whether the coherence of one’s experience makes that experience more (...)
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  • The Appearance of Skepticism: Possibility, Conceivability and Infinite Ascent.Sorin Bangu - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (2):94-107.
    The paper articulates a novel strategy against external world skepticism. It shows that a modal assumption of the skeptical argument cannot be justified.
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  • Inference to the best explanation, coherence and other explanatory virtues.Adolfas Mackonis - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):975-995.
    This article generalizes the explanationist account of inference to the best explanation. It draws a clear distinction between IBE and abduction and presents abduction as the first step of IBE. The second step amounts to the evaluation of explanatory power, which consist in the degree of explanatory virtues that a hypothesis exhibits. Moreover, even though coherence is the most often cited explanatory virtue, on pain of circularity, it should not be treated as one of the explanatory virtues. Rather, coherence should (...)
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  • Dimensions of predictive success.Pekka Syrjänen - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
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  • Methods of Inference and Shaken Baby Syndrome.Nicholas Binney - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1).
    Exploring the early development of an area of medical literature can inform contemporary medical debates. Different methods of inference include deduction, induction, abduction, and inference to the best explanation. I argue that early shaken baby research is best understood as using abduction to tentatively suggest that infants with unexplained intracranial and ocular bleeding have been assaulted. However, this tentative conclusion was quickly interpreted, by some at least, as a general rule that infants with these pathological signs were certainly cases of (...)
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