CLPEX Chat Board

With all the talk about certainty, to the exclusion of all others, etc, I thought I'd send out a link to an article that has helped me to form my ideas.

Inference to the Best Explanation

The notion is an extension of what Charles Sanders Pierce began with his articulation of abduction, and says that conclusions should be the best explanation, given the evidence. The article is admittedly lacking on what constitutes 'the best', but gives some virtues such as simplicity, explanatory power and plausability.

Since this article was written in 1965 there are many others who have gone on to philosophize about what comprises each of those virtues, but this is a pretty foundational paper, so it's worth the read. There's some philosophical terminology that may need some research if you're not familiar with the notions of induction or lemmas, but hey, you've got the internet right in front of you so there's a good place to start.

The way that this applies to what we do is that it takes the argument out of the realm of 'all or nothing'. It seems that on this chat board that people tend to believe a) individualizations are 100% certain because science is certain or b)the dictates of science/reason don't allow me to say 100% so I have to cop to 'less than certain' but there's not a unified way to say it. Training and experience, reliable predictability, and probabilism (both subjective and via likelihoods) are ways to cope.

While each of those have their appeal and limitations depending on what philosophical bent you adhere to, I think that in the end it boils down to knowing what you believe, why you believe it, and the limits of that belief. In other words, it comes down to explanatory power (aka justifications). Some people want to strengthen explanatory power by using probabilities, science terminology, graphs, charts, props, etc, but at some point you have to show your cards. If there is a better explanation for the conclusion or a better conclusion given the evidence it's up to us first and foremost before it goes to a defense attorney/defense expert. First as the examiner in using proper reasoning/testing, and secondly as the verifier in scrutinizing the justifications, methods and conclusions of the examiner.


A quote from the paper reads:

Uses of the inference to the best explanation are manifold. When a detective puts the evidence together and decides that it must have
been the butler, he is reasoning that no other explanation which accounts for all the facts is plausible enough or simple enough to
be accepted. When a scientist infers th'e existence of atoms and subatomic particles, he is inferring the truth of an explanation for various
data which he wishes to account for. These seem the obvious cases; but there are many others. When we infer that a witness is telling the
truth, our inference goes as follows: (i) we infer that he says what he does because he believes it; (ii) we infer that he believes what he
does because he actually did witness the situation which he describes. That is, our confidence in his testimony is based on our conclusion
about the most plausible explanation for that testimony. Our confidence fails if we come to think there is some other possible explanation
for his testimony (if, for example, he stands to gain a great deal from our believing him). Or, to take a different sort of example, when we
infer from a person's behavior to some fact about his mental experience, we are inferring that the latter fact explains better than some other
explanation what he does.