Determining the Need for Explanation

Jakobsen, Martin

doi:10.37977/faithphil.2020.37.2.6

“…The most significant difficulty is that it is "unclear that there is any plausible non-trivial analysis" (Baras 2020(Baras : 1504 of the concept of "explanatory requirement", or related concepts such as "crying out for an explanation." Often, in efforts to articulate what it means for some fact F to require an explanation, philosophers propose analyses such as F requires an explanation if and only if F is "surprising", or "unexpected", or "striking" given our background knowledge (e.g., Horwich 1982;White 2005;Jakobsen 2020).…”

Section: When Do Facts Require An Explanation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inference to the Best Explanation: An Overview

Cabrera

¹

2023

Handbook of Abductive Cognition

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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, the rest of the entry is organized around an examination of various problems that IBE confronts, along with some extant attempts to address these problems. In section 4, I consider the question of when a fact requires an explanation, since presumably IBE applies only in cases where some explanation is called for. In section 5, I consider the difficult question of how we ought to understand IBE in light of the fact that among philosophers, there is significant disagreement about what constitutes an explanation. In section 6, I consider different strategies for justifying the truth-conduciveness of the explanatory virtues, e.g., simplicity, unification, scope, etc., criteria which play an indispensable role in any given application of IBE. In section 7, I survey some of the most recent literature on IBE, much of which consists of investigations of the status of IBE from the standpoint of the Bayesian philosophy of science.

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“…(Street 2006, p. 121) Street points out that our moral beliefs may correspond to moral facts, but given evolutionary influences, such a correspondence would be extremely unlikely-so unlikely that it "begs for an explanation" (Street 2006, p. 125). Street's reasoning shows that given evolutionary influences, the correlation between moral facts and moral beliefs is not something to be expected but a rather striking correlation that requires an explanation (Jakobsen 2020a). In the next section, I will argue that Christian theism provides such a good explanation of this correlation that it is possible to formulate a sort of moral fine-tuning argument, namely a theistic argument from moral epistemology.…”

Section: The Epistemological Problem: Explaining Correlationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Moral Fine-Tuning Argument

Jakobsen

2023

Religions

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This paper develops Mark D. Linville’s brief description of “a sort of moral fine-tuning argument”. I develop the argument in four ways: I unpack the argument and give it a clear formulation, I unpack the theistic explanation of why a somewhat reliable moral capacity is expected, I point to the significance of not seeking to explain a perfect moral capacity, and I put the argument up against the recent work on non-theistic moral epistemology by Derek Parfit, David Enoch, and Erik Wielenberg.

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“…The most significant difficulty is that it is "unclear that there is any plausible non-trivial analysis" (Baras 2020(Baras : 1504 of the concept of "explanatory requirement", or related concepts such as "crying out for an explanation." Often, in efforts to articulate what it means for some fact F to require an explanation, philosophers propose analyses such as F requires an explanation if and only if F is "surprising", or "unexpected", or "striking" given our background knowledge (e.g., Horwich 1982;White 2005;Jakobsen 2020).…”

Section: When Do Facts Require An Explanation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inference to the Best Explanation: An Overview

Cabrera

¹

2022

Handbook of Abductive Cognition

3

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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, the rest of the entry is organized around an examination of various problems that IBE confronts, along with some extant attempts to address these problems. In section 4, I consider the question of when a fact requires an explanation, since presumably IBE applies only in cases where some explanation is called for. In section 5, I consider the difficult question of how we ought to understand IBE in light of the fact that among philosophers, there is significant disagreement about what constitutes an explanation. In section 6, I consider different strategies for justifying the truth-conduciveness of the explanatory virtues, e.g., simplicity, unification, scope, etc., criteria which play an indispensable role in any given application of IBE. In section 7, I survey some of the most recent literature on IBE, much of which consists of investigations of the status of IBE from the standpoint of the Bayesian philosophy of science.

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Determining the Need for Explanation

Cited by 4 publications

References 7 publications

Inference to the Best Explanation: An Overview

Inference to the Best Explanation: An Overview

A Moral Fine-Tuning Argument

Inference to the Best Explanation: An Overview

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