Is epistemic anxiety an intellectual virtue?

Cabrera, Frank

doi:10.1007/s11229-021-03383-2

“…This subtle point is acknowledged in the formulation of IBE provided by Lycan (2002: 413), according to which the facts that begin the process of IBE are ones that are "in need of an explanation." Although Harman (1965) makes no mention of this "explanatory requirement" condition, and indeed some other schematizations of IBE exclude it (e.g., Psillos 2002), as Cabrera (2021b) argues, this qualification included by Lycan should not be neglected in our account of IBE. If some fact or set of facts F did not require an explanation, then to infer that H is true, or probably true because H explains F better than its competitors would amount to a non-sequitur.…”

Section: When Do Facts Require An Explanation?mentioning

confidence: 96%

Inference to the Best Explanation: An Overview

Cabrera

¹

2022

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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Inference to the Best Explanation: An Overview

Cabrera

¹

2023

Handbook of Abductive Cognition

Self Cite

1

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.

show abstract