Explanatory Reasoning: A Probabilistic Interpretation

Iranzo, Valeriano

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-26506-3_20

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…33 See: Okasha (2000), McGrew (2003), Lipton (2004, Ch. 7), Psillos (2004), Weisberg (2009), Henderson (2014), Glass (2012), Iranzo (2016), Cabrera (2017), Dellsén (2018), Douven and Wenmackers (2017), Bird (2017), Climenhaga (2017a), Schupbach (2017), andBlanchard (2018). 34 See Earman (1992) for a book-length examination of Bayesianism and Sober (2002) for a shorter discussion of the scope and limitations of Bayesianism.…”

Section: New Directions: Ibe and Bayesianismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inference to the Best Explanation: An Overview

Cabrera

2023

Handbook of Abductive Cognition

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.

show abstract