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. The second edition has been substantially enlarged and reworked, with a new chapter on the relationship between explanation and Bayesianism, and an extension and defence of the account of contrastive explanation. It also includes an expanded defence of the claims that our inferences really are guided by diverse explanatory considerations, and that this pattern of inference can take us towards the truth. This edition of Inference to the Best Explanation has also been updated throughout and includes a new bibliography. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Induction | 5 |
Justification | 7 |
Description | 11 |
Explanation | 21 |
Reason familiarity deduction unification necessity | 23 |
The causal model | 30 |
Failed reductions and false differences | 37 |
Explanation as a guide to inference | 121 |
Improved coverage | 126 |
Explanatory obsessions | 128 |
From cause to explanation | 132 |
Loveliness and truth Voltaires objection | 142 |
The twostage process | 148 |
Is the best good enough? | 151 |
Prediction and prejudice | 164 |
Causal triangulation | 41 |
Inference to the Best Explanation | 55 |
Attractions and repulsions | 64 |
Contrastive inference | 71 |
Explanation and deduction | 82 |
The raven paradox | 91 |
The Method of Agreement | 99 |
Bayesian abduction | 103 |
The Bayesian and the explanationist should be friends | 107 |
Contrastive inference revisited | 117 |
The fudging explanation | 168 |
Actual and assessed support | 177 |
Truth and explanation | 184 |
A bad explanation | 192 |
The scientific evidence | 198 |
Conclusion | 207 |
211 | |
217 | |
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References to this book
Abduction, Reason and Science: Processes of Discovery and Explanation L. Magnani No preview available - 2001 |
The Evolution of Institutional Economics: Agency, Structure, and Darwinism ... Geoffrey Martin Hodgson No preview available - 2004 |