Inference to the Best ExplanationHow do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses, and making inferences? According to the model of Inference to the Best Explanation, we work out what to infer from the evidence by thinking about what would actually explain that evidence, and we take the ability of a hypothesis to explain the evidence as a sign that the hypothesis is correct. In Inference to the Best Explanation, Peter Lipton gives this important and influential idea the development and assessment it deserves. |
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... principles that underlie those judgments. In the cases of inference and explanation, the contrast between what we can do and what we can describe is stark, for we are remarkably bad at principled description. We seem to have been ...
... principles does not guarantee a unique solution. The information that Tom spent five dollars on apples and oranges and that apples are fifty cents a pound and oranges a dollar a pound underdetermines how much fruit Tom bought, given ...
... principles of deduction and induction, children must be born with strong linguistic rules or principles that further restrict the class of languages they will learn, so that the actual words they hear are now sufficient to determine a ...
... principles of inference, and we may study the patterns of our inferences in an attempt to discover what those principles are and to determine what they are worth. Justification The two central questions about our general principles of ...
... principles are at least moderately reliable. So the skeptical argument requires a second component, an argument for circularity, which attempts to show that we cannot rule out the possibility of massive unreliability that ...