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How Explanatory Reasoning Justifies Pursuit: A Peircean View of IBE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

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Abstract

This article develops and defends an account of inference to the best explanation according to which it first and foremost justifies pursuing hypotheses rather than accepting them as true. This sidesteps the issue of why better explanations should be more likely to be true. I defend an account of justification for pursuit, inspired by Peirce’s mature account of abduction, and develop it as a formal decision-theoretic model. This account provides a straightforward connection between explanatoriness and justification for pursuit.

Type
Explanation and Mechanisms
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , December 2015 , pp. 749 - 760
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am grateful to Nancy Cartwright, Julian Reiss, Emmanuel Genot, and two referees for comments on earlier drafts, to the CHESS research group in Durham, and to the audiences at the Second Nordic Network for Philosophy of Science Meeting in Lund and the Ninth UK Integrated HPS Conference in Leeds.

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