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Inference to the Best Explanation, Cleaned Up and Made Respectable

In Kevin McCain & Ted Poston (eds.), Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 39-61 (2017)

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  1. Which Models of Scientific Explanation Are (In)Compatible with Inference to the Best Explanation?Yunus Prasetya - 2024 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 75 (1):209-232.
    In this article, I explore the compatibility of inference to the best explanation (IBE) with several influential models and accounts of scientific explanation. First, I explore the different conceptions of IBE and limit my discussion to two: the heuristic conception and the objective Bayesian conception. Next, I discuss five models of scientific explanation with regard to each model’s compatibility with IBE. I argue that Kitcher’s unificationist account supports IBE; Railton’s deductive–nomological–probabilistic model, Salmon’s statistical-relevance model, and van Fraassen’s erotetic account are (...)
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  • How good is an explanation?David H. Glass - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-26.
    How good is an explanation and when is one explanation better than another? In this paper, I address these questions by exploring probabilistic measures of explanatory power in order to defend a particular Bayesian account of explanatory goodness. Critical to this discussion is a distinction between weak and strong measures of explanatory power due to Good (Br J Philos Sci 19:123–143, 1968). In particular, I argue that if one is interested in the overall goodness of an explanation, an appropriate balance (...)
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  • Cosmic Skepticism and the Beginning of Physical Reality (Doctoral Dissertation).Linford Dan - 2022 - Dissertation, Purdue University
    This dissertation is concerned with two of the largest questions that we can ask about the nature of physical reality: first, whether physical reality begin to exist and, second, what criteria would physical reality have to fulfill in order to have had a beginning? Philosophers of religion and theologians have previously addressed whether physical reality began to exist in the context of defending the Kal{\'a}m Cosmological Argument (KCA) for theism, that is, (P1) everything that begins to exist has a cause (...)
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  • Inference to the Best Explanation - An Overview.Frank Cabrera - 2023 - In Lorenzo Magnani (ed.), Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer. pp. 1-34.
    In this article, I will provide a critical overview of the form of non-deductive reasoning commonly known as “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE). Roughly speaking, according to IBE, we ought to infer the hypothesis that provides the best explanation of our evidence. In section 2, I survey some contemporary formulations of IBE and highlight some of its putative applications. In section 3, I distinguish IBE from C.S. Peirce’s notion of abduction. After underlining some of the essential elements of IBE, (...)
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  • Goodness, availability, and argument structure.Anna-Sara Malmgren - 2021 - Synthese 198:10395-10427.
    According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been (...)
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  • On the pragmatic and epistemic virtues of inference to the best explanation.Richard Pettigrew - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12407-12438.
    In a series of papers over the past twenty years, and in a new book, Igor Douven has argued that Bayesians are too quick to reject versions of inference to the best explanation that cannot be accommodated within their framework. In this paper, I survey their worries and attempt to answer them using a series of pragmatic and purely epistemic arguments that I take to show that Bayes’ Rule really is the only rational way to respond to your evidence.
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  • Conjunctive Explanations and Inference to the Best Explanation.Jonah Schupbach - 2019 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 38 (3):143-162.
    Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) advises reasoners to infer exactly one explanation. This uniqueness claim apparently binds us when it comes to “conjunctive explanations,” distinct explanations that are nonetheless explanatorily better together than apart. To confront this worry, explanationists qualify their statement of IBE, stipulating that this inference form only adjudicates between competing hypotheses. However, a closer look into the nature of competition reveals problems for this qualified account. Given the most common explication of competition, this qualification artificially and (...)
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  • Getting to Know the World Scientifically: An Objective View.Paul Needham - 2020 - Cham, Schweiz: Springer.
    This undergraduate textbook introduces some fundamental issues in philosophy of science for students of philosophy and science students. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 deals with knowledge and values. Chap. 1 presents the classical conception of knowledge as initiated by the ancient Greeks and elaborated during the development of science, introducing the central concepts of truth, belief and justification. Aspects of the quest for objectivity are taken up in the following two chapters. Moral issues are broached in (...)
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  • IBE in engineering science - the case of malfunction explanation.Kristian González Barman & Dingmar van Eck - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-19.
    In this paper we investigate how inference to the best explanation (IBE) works in engineering science, focussing on the context of malfunction explanation. While IBE has gotten a lot of attention in the philosophy of science literature, few, if any, philosophical work has focussed on IBE in engineering science practice. We first show that IBE in engineering science has a similar structure as IBE in other scientific domains in the sense that in both settings IBE hinges on the weighing of (...)
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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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  • Against Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Quality.Marc Lange - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (2):252-267.
    Several philosophers propose probabilistic measures of how well a potential scientific explanation would explain the given evidence. These measures could elaborate “best” in “inference to the best explanation”. This paper argues that none of these measures succeeds. The paper considers the various rival explanations that scientists proposed for the parallelogram of forces. Scientists regarded various features of these proposals as making them more or less “lovely”. None of these probabilistic measures of loveliness can reflect these features. The paper concludes by (...)
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  • Is cancer a matter of luck?Anya Plutynski - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (1):1-28.
    In 2015, Tomasetti and Vogelstein published a paper in Science containing the following provocative statement: “… only a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or inherited predispositions. The majority is due to “bad luck,” that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells.” The paper—and perhaps especially this rather coy reference to “bad luck”—became a flash point for a series of letters and reviews, followed by replies and yet (...)
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  • El estatus epistémico de Los experimentos mentales en ciencias fácticas.Bruno Borge & Guadalupe Mettini - 2018 - Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 59 (140):341-364.
    RESUMEN Un experimento mental en ciencias fácticas consiste en la representación de un escenario imaginario. A partir de la presentación de condiciones iniciales y la postulación de una situación hipotética o contrafáctica, se solicita al lector que realice mentalmente alguna operación, manipule ciertas variables o ponga en funcionamiento algún aparato o instrumento. En virtud de este ejercicio sería posible, en principio, obtener nuevo conocimiento acerca de algún aspecto del mundo natural. El debate acerca de las funciones de los experimentos mentales (...)
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  • The reasonable doubt standard as inference to the best explanation.Hylke Jellema - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):949-973.
    Explanationist accounts of rational legal proof view trials as a competition between explanations. Such accounts are often criticized for being underdeveloped. One question in need of further attention is when guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal trials. This article defends an inference to the best explanation -based approach on which guilt is only established BARD if the best guilt explanation in a case is substantially more plausible than any innocence explanation, and there is no good reason to (...)
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