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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) either contradicts itself or equivocates, and therefore cannot coherently describe inductive or evidential support.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.It is part of the meaning of 'explanation' that if one theory is more explanatory than another, the more explanatory theory must be more informative than the less explanatory theory.
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    • 2.A more informative theory cannot be more likely to be true than a less informative theory (elementary logical point).
      ?

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    • 3.IBE claims that more explanatory theories receive greater inductive or evidential support (i.e., are more likely to be true).
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Lipton's 'loveliness vs. likeliness' distinction, meant to rescue IBE, tacitly concedes that explanatory virtue and truth-conduciveness are conceptually independent.
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    • 2.If loveliness (explanatory power) must be converted into likeliness via a separate bridging principle, IBE becomes an enthymeme whose suppressed premise does all the justificatory work.
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    • 3.A rule of inference that requires an unjustified auxiliary premise to function is not a self-standing inferential principle but a disguised appeal to the very probabilistic reasoning it purports to ground.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.van Fraassen's argument in 'Laws and Symmetry' demonstrates that any probabilistic model of IBE must privilege certain hypotheses prior to evidence, importing undisclosed priors under explanatory language.
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    • 2.Equivocation on 'best' between 'most empirically adequate' and 'most ontologically parsimonious' means IBE selects different conclusions depending on which reading is operative at any given inferential step.
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