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  1. Eliminative abduction: examples from medicine.Alexander Bird - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (4):345-352.
    Peter Lipton argues that inference to the best explanation involves the selection of a hypothesis on the basis of its loveliness. I argue that in optimal cases of IBE we may be able to eliminate all but one of the hypotheses. In such cases we have a form of eliminative induction takes place, which I call ‘Holmesian inference’. I argue that Lipton’s example in which Ignaz Semmelweis identified a cause of puerperal fever better illustrates Holmesian inference than Liptonian IBE. I (...)
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  • (1 other version)Précis of Inference to the Best Explanation, 2 nd Edition.Peter Lipton - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2):421-423.
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  • Inference to the Best Explanation.Peter Lipton - 1991 - London and New York: Routledge.
    How do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses, and making inferences? According to the model of _Inference to the Best Explanation_, we work out what to infer from the evidence by thinking about what would actually explain that evidence, and we take the ability of a hypothesis to explain the evidence as a sign that the hypothesis is correct. In _Inference to the Best Explanation_, Peter Lipton gives this important and influential idea the development and assessment it deserves. The (...)
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  • Epistemic causality and evidence-based medicine.Federica Russo & Jon Williamson - 2011 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 33 (4).
    Causal claims in biomedical contexts are ubiquitous albeit they are not always made explicit. This paper addresses the question of what causal claims mean in the context of disease. It is argued that in medical contexts causality ought to be interpreted according to the epistemic theory. The epistemic theory offers an alternative to traditional accounts that cash out causation either in terms of “difference-making” relations or in terms of mechanisms. According to the epistemic approach, causal claims tell us about which (...)
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  • Mechanisms and the Evidence Hierarchy.Brendan Clarke, Donald Gillies, Phyllis Illari, Federica Russo & Jon Williamson - 2014 - Topoi 33 (2):339-360.
    Evidence-based medicine (EBM) makes use of explicit procedures for grading evidence for causal claims. Normally, these procedures categorise evidence of correlation produced by statistical trials as better evidence for a causal claim than evidence of mechanisms produced by other methods. We argue, in contrast, that evidence of mechanisms needs to be viewed as complementary to, rather than inferior to, evidence of correlation. In this paper we first set out the case for treating evidence of mechanisms alongside evidence of correlation in (...)
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  • Bayes or Bust?: A Critical Examination of Bayesian Confirmation Theory.John Earman - 1992 - MIT Press.
    There is currently no viable alternative to the Bayesian analysis of scientific inference, yet the available versions of Bayesianism fail to do justice to several aspects of the testing and confirmation of scientific hypotheses. Bayes or Bust? provides the first balanced treatment of the complex set of issues involved in this nagging conundrum in the philosophy of science. Both Bayesians and anti-Bayesians will find a wealth of new insights on topics ranging from Bayes’s original paper to contemporary formal learning theory.In (...)
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  • Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation.Michael Strevens - 2008 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    Approaches to explanation -- Causal and explanatory relevance -- The kairetic account of /D making -- The kairetic account of explanation -- Extending the kairetic account -- Event explanation and causal claims -- Regularity explanation -- Abstraction in regularity explanation -- Approaches to probabilistic explanation -- Kairetic explanation of frequencies -- Kairetic explanation of single outcomes -- Looking outward -- Looking inward.
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  • Nature's Metaphysics: Laws and Properties.Alexander Bird - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Professional philosophers and advanced students working in metaphysics and the philosophy of science will find this book both provocative and stimulating.
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  • Nature's capacities and their measurement.Nancy Cartwright - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Ever since David Hume, empiricists have barred powers and capacities from nature. In this book Cartwright argues that capacities are essential in our scientific world, and, contrary to empiricist orthodoxy, that they can meet sufficiently strict demands for testability. Econometrics is one discipline where probabilities are used to measure causal capacities, and the technology of modern physics provides several examples of testing capacities (such as lasers). Cartwright concludes by applying the lessons of the book about capacities and probabilities to the (...)
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  • (1 other version)Evidence: Fundamental concepts and the phenomenal conception.Thomas Kelly - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (5):933-955.
    The concept of evidence is among the central concerns of epistemology broadly construed. As such, it has long engaged the intellectual energies of both philosophers of science and epistemologists of a more traditional variety. Here I briefly survey some of the more important ideas to have emerged from this tradition of reflection. I then look somewhat more closely at an issue that has recently come to the fore, largely as a result of Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits: that of whether (...)
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  • Inference to the only explanation. [REVIEW]Alexander Bird - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2):424–432.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming).
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  • Interpreting causality in the health sciences.Federica Russo & Jon Williamson - 2007 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21 (2):157 – 170.
    We argue that the health sciences make causal claims on the basis of evidence both of physical mechanisms, and of probabilistic dependencies. Consequently, an analysis of causality solely in terms of physical mechanisms or solely in terms of probabilistic relationships, does not do justice to the causal claims of these sciences. Yet there seems to be a single relation of cause in these sciences - pluralism about causality will not do either. Instead, we maintain, the health sciences require a theory (...)
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  • Keynes's weight of argument and Popper's paradox of ideal evidence.Rod O'Donnell - 1992 - Philosophy of Science 59 (1):44-52.
    Popper's paradox of ideal evidence has long been viewed as a telling criticism of Keynes's logical theory of probability and its associated concept of the weight of argument. This paper shows that a simple addition to Keynes's definitions of irrelevance enables his theory to elude the paradox with ease. The modified definition draws on ideas already present in Keynes's Treatise on Probability (1973). As a consequence, relevant evidence and the weight of argument may increase, even when new evidence leaves the (...)
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  • Defending abduction.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (3):451.
    Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called " hypothesis " or " abduction." He characterized abduction as reasoning " from effect to cause," and as " the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis." Peirce ' s ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning, have been seen as providing a logic of scientific discovery. Alternatively, abduction is interpreted as giving reasons for pursuing (...)
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  • The inference to the best explanation.Gilbert H. Harman - 1965 - Philosophical Review 74 (1):88-95.
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  • Twelve questions about Keynes's concept of weight.L. Jonathan Cohen - 1986 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 37 (3):263-278.
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  • Reversing the counterfactual analysis of causation.Alex Broadbent - 2007 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (2):169 – 189.
    The counterfactual analysis of causation has focused on one particular counterfactual conditional, taking as its starting-point the suggestion that C causes E iff (C E). In this paper, some consequences are explored of reversing this counterfactual, and developing an account starting with the idea that C causes E iff (E C). This suggestion is discussed in relation to the problem of pre-emption. It is found that the 'reversed' counterfactual analysis can handle even the most difficult cases of pre-emption with only (...)
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  • Laws and essences.Alexander Bird - 2005 - Ratio 18 (4):437–461.
    Those who favour an ontology based on dispositions are thereby able to provide a dispositional essentialist account of the laws of nature. In part 1 of this paper I sketch the dispositional essentialist conception of properties and the concomitant account of laws. In part 2, I characterise various claims about the modal character of properties that fall under the heading ‘quidditism’ and which are consequences of the categoricalist view of properties, which is the alternative to the dispositional essentialist view. I (...)
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  • (1 other version)Précis of Inference to the Best Explanation, 2 nd Edition.Peter Lipton - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2):421-423.
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  • Probabilistic Alternatives to Bayesianism: The Case of Explanationism.Igor Douven & Jonah N. Schupbach - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
    There has been a probabilistic turn in contemporary cognitive science. Far and away, most of the work in this vein is Bayesian, at least in name. Coinciding with this development, philosophers have increasingly promoted Bayesianism as the best normative account of how humans ought to reason. In this paper, we make a push for exploring the probabilistic terrain outside of Bayesianism. Non-Bayesian, but still probabilistic, theories provide plausible competitors both to descriptive and normative Bayesian accounts. We argue for this general (...)
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  • How Degrees of Belief Reflect Evidence.James M. Joyce - 2005 - Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1):153-179.
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  • What is a mechanism? Thinking about mechanisms across the sciences.Phyllis McKay Illari & Jon Williamson - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (1):119-135.
    After a decade of intense debate about mechanisms, there is still no consensus characterization. In this paper we argue for a characterization that applies widely to mechanisms across the sciences. We examine and defend our disagreements with the major current contenders for characterizations of mechanisms. Ultimately, we indicate that the major contenders can all sign up to our characterization.
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  • Simply the best: A case for abduction.Stathos Psillos - 2002 - In Computational Logic: Logic Programming and Beyond : Essays in Honour of Robert A. Kowalski, Part Ii. Springer Berlin. pp. 83-93.
    This paper formulates what I think is the basic problem of any attempt to characterise the abstract structure of scientific method, viz., that it has to satisfy two conflicting desiderata: it should be ampliative (contentincreasing) and it should confer epistemic warrant on its outcomes. Then, after two extreme solutions to the problem of the method, viz., Enumerative Induction and the Method of Hypothesis, are examined, the paper argues that abduction, suitably understood as Inference to the Best Explanation, offers the best (...)
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  • Making a Difference.Peter Lipton - 1993 - Philosophica 51.
    An effect is typically explained by citing a cause, but not any cause will do. The oxygen and the spark were both causes of the fire, but normally only the spark explains it. What then distinguishes explanatory from unexplanatory causes? One might attempt to characterise this distinction in terms of intrinsic features of the causes. For example, some causes are changes while others are standing conditions, and one might claim that only the changes explain. Both the spark and the oxygen (...)
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  • (1 other version)Evidence.Thomas Kelly - 2006 - Philosophy Compass.
    The concept of evidence is central to both epistemology and the philosophy of science. Of course, ‘evidence’ is hardly a philosopher's term of art: it is not only, or even primarily, philosophers who routinely speak of evidence, but also lawyers and judges, historians and scientists, investigative journalists and reporters, as well as the members of numerous other professions and ordinary folk in the course of everyday life. The concept of evidence would thus seem to be on firmer pre-theoretical ground than (...)
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  • The fine structure of inference to the best explanation. [REVIEW]Stathis Psillos - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2):441–448.
    Traditionally, philosophers have focused mostly on the logical template of inference. The paradigm-case has been deductive inference, which is topic-neutral and context-insensitive. The study of deductive rules has engendered the search for the Holy Grail: syntactic and topic-neutral accounts of all prima facie reasonable inferential rules. The search has hoped to find rules that are transparent and algorithmic, and whose following will just be a matter of grasping their logical form. Part of the search for the Holy Grail has been (...)
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  • Evidence in medicine and evidence-based medicine.John Worrall - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (6):981–1022.
    It is surely obvious that medicine, like any other rational activity, must be based on evidence. The interest is in the details: how exactly are the general principles of the logic of evidence to be applied in medicine? Focussing on the development, and current claims of the ‘Evidence-Based Medicine’ movement, this article raises a number of difficulties with the rationales that have been supplied in particular for the ‘evidence hierarchy’ and for the very special role within that hierarchy of randomized (...)
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  • Inference to the best explanation: does it track truth?David H. Glass - 2012 - Synthese 185 (3):411-427.
    In the form of inference known as inference to the best explanation there are various ways to characterise what is meant by the best explanation. This paper considers a number of such characterisations including several based on confirmation measures and several based on coherence measures. The goal is to find a measure which adequately captures what is meant by 'best' and which also yields the truth with a high degree of probability. Computer simulations are used to show that the overlap (...)
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  • Evidence: philosophy of science meets medicine.John Worrall - 2010 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 16 (2):356-362.
    Obviously medicine should be evidence-based. The issues lie in the details: what exactly counts as evidence? Do certain kinds of evidence carry more weight than others? (And if so why?) And how exactly should medicine be based on evidence? When it comes to these details, the evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement has got itself into a mess – or so it will be argued. In order to start to resolve this mess, we need to go 'back to basics'; and that means (...)
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  • The role of explanatory considerations in updating.Igor Douven & Jonah N. Schupbach - 2015 - Cognition 142 (C):299-311.
    There is an ongoing controversy in philosophy about the connection between explanation and inference. According to Bayesians, explanatory considerations should be given weight in determining which inferences to make, if at all, only insofar as doing so is compatible with Strict Conditionalization. Explanationists, on the other hand, hold that explanatory considerations can be relevant to the question of how much confidence to invest in our hypotheses in ways which violate Strict Conditionalization. The controversy has focused on normative issues. This paper (...)
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  • Précis of Depth. [REVIEW]Michael Strevens - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2):447-460.
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  • Coherence measures and inference to the best explanation.David H. Glass - 2007 - Synthese 157 (3):275-296.
    This paper considers an application of work on probabilistic measures of coherence to inference to the best explanation. Rather than considering information reported from different sources, as is usually the case when discussing coherence measures, the approach adopted here is to use a coherence measure to rank competing explanations in terms of their coherence with a piece of evidence. By adopting such an approach IBE can be made more precise and so a major objection to this mode of reasoning can (...)
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  • Inference to the Best Explanation versus Bayes’s Rule in a Social Setting.Igor Douven & Sylvia Wenmackers - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2).
    This article compares inference to the best explanation with Bayes’s rule in a social setting, specifically, in the context of a variant of the Hegselmann–Krause model in which agents not only update their belief states on the basis of evidence they receive directly from the world, but also take into account the belief states of their fellow agents. So far, the update rules mentioned have been studied only in an individualistic setting, and it is known that in such a setting (...)
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  • Modelling mechanisms with causal cycles.Brendan Clarke, Bert Leuridan & Jon Williamson - 2014 - Synthese 191 (8):1-31.
    Mechanistic philosophy of science views a large part of scientific activity as engaged in modelling mechanisms. While science textbooks tend to offer qualitative models of mechanisms, there is increasing demand for models from which one can draw quantitative predictions and explanations. Casini et al. (Theoria 26(1):5–33, 2011) put forward the Recursive Bayesian Networks (RBN) formalism as well suited to this end. The RBN formalism is an extension of the standard Bayesian net formalism, an extension that allows for modelling the hierarchical (...)
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  • Replies to Weatherson, Hall, and Lange. [REVIEW]Michael Strevens - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2):492-505.
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  • Mechanisms and Difference-Making.Stefan Dragulinescu - 2016 - Acta Analytica 32 (1):29-54.
    I argue that difference-making should be a crucial element for evaluating the quality of evidence for mechanisms, especially with respect to the robustness of mechanisms, and that it should take central stage when it comes to the general role played by mechanisms in establishing causal claims in medicine. The difference- making of mechanisms should provide additional compelling reasons to accept the gist of Russo-Williamson thesis and include mechanisms in the protocols for Evidence- Based Medicine (EBM), as the EBM+ research group (...)
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  • Hippocrate.Jacques Jouanna & Antonio Garzya - 1994 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 16 (1):155.
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  • Is explanation a guide to inference? A reply to Wesley salmon.Peter Lipton - 2001 - In Giora Hon (ed.), The Why and How of Explanation: An Analytical Exposition. Springer.
    Earlier in this volume, Wesley Salmon has given a characteristically clear and trenchant critique of the account of non-demonstrative reasoning known by the slogan `Inference to the Best Explanation'. As a long-time fan of the idea that explanatory considerations are a guide to inference, I was delighted by the suggestion that Wes and I might work together on a discussion of the issues. In the event, this project has exceeded my high expectations, for in addition to the intellectual gain that (...)
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