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Inference to the Best Explanation: An Overview

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Handbook of Abductive Cognition

Abstract

This article provides a critical overview of the form of nondeductive reasoning commonly known as “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE). Roughly speaking, according to IBE, one ought to infer the hypothesis that provides the best explanation of one’s evidence. In Section (What Is Inference to the Best Explanation?), some contemporary formulations of IBE are surveyed, and some of its putative applications are highlighted. In Section (Peirce’s Abduction and IBE: An Aside), IBE is distinguished 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 (When Do Facts Require an Explanation?), the question of when a fact requires an explanation is considered, since presumably IBE applies only in cases where some explanation is called for. Section (What Counts as an Explanation?) examines the difficult question of how one ought to understand IBE in light of the fact that among philosophers, there is significant disagreement about what constitutes an explanation. Section (Do the Explanatory Virtues Track the Truth?) considers 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. Section (New Directions: IBE and Bayesianism) surveys 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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Milwaukee School of Engineering, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Frank Cabrera

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  1. Frank Cabrera
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Correspondence to Frank Cabrera .

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  1. Department of Humanities, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy

    Lorenzo Magnani

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  1. Department of Humanities, Philosophy Section and Computational Philosophy Laboratory, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy

    Lorenzo Magnani

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Cabrera, F. (2022). Inference to the Best Explanation: An Overview. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_77-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_77-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-68436-5

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