Putting explanation back into “inference to the best explanation”

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21364031
AutoresMarc Lange (0000-0002-0704-7376, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen56
Número1
Páginas84-109
Fecha de publicación2022-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaNoûs (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0029-4624 • E-ISSN: 1468-0068
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/nous.12349
OpenAlexW3080328377
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11
Referencias citadas28

Many philosophers argue that explanatoriness plays no special role in confirmation – that “inference to the best explanation” (IBE) incorrectly demands giving hypotheses extra credit for their potential explanatory qualities beyond the credit they already deserve for their predictive successes. This paper argues against one common strategy for responding to this thought – that is, for trying to fit IBE within a Bayesian framework. That strategy argues that a hypothesis’ explanatory quality (its “loveliness”) contributes either to its prior probability or to its likelihood. This paper argues that this strategy fails because it must give different treatments to two hypotheses that are unlovely for the very same reason. The strategy therefore loses the insight into scientific reasoning that its reconstruction in terms of IBE is supposed to provide. The paper then provides a Bayesian account of the confirmatory role of explanatoriness that represents explanatory quality as having an impact in the same place for two hypotheses that are unlovely for the very same reason. This approach works by “putting explanation back into IBE” – that is, by invoking hypotheses that refer explicitly to scientific explanation and by invoking the agent's background opinions regarding the kind of explanation that the evidence is liable to have. On this approach, there is no list of “explanatory virtues” the possession of which always helps to make an explanation better. Rather, for different facts, there are different characteristics that our background knowledge of other explanations gives us some reason to expect the given fact's explanation to possess

Bayesian inference · Bayesian probability · Economics · Epistemology · Inference · Positive economics · Possession (linguistics) · Quality (philosophy) · Artificial Intelligence · Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies · Computer Science · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Psychology