Sources for Topics

IBE: Inference to the best explanation

Kevin McCain and Ted Poston, eds. Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation. Oxford University Press.

1. Best Explanations: An Introduction, Kevin McCain and Ted Poston
          Part I. Inference to the Best Explanation
2. Inference to the Best Explanation: What Is It? And Why Should We Care?, Igor Douven
3. Peirce and Ramsey: Truth, Pragmatism, and Inference to the Best Explanation, Cheryl Misak
4. Inference to the Best Explanation, Cleaned Up and Made Respectable, Jonah N. Schupbach
          Part II. The Fundamentality of Inference to the Best Explanation
5. Reasoning to the Best Explanation, Richard Fumerton
6. Inference to the Best Explanation: Fundamentalism’s Failures,Kareem Khalifa, Jared Millson, and Mark Risjord
7. Inference to the Best Explanation, Bayesianism, and Knowledge, Alexander Bird
8. The Evidential Impact of Explanatory Considerations, Kevin McCain and Ted Poston
          Part III. Justifying Inference to the Best Explanation
9. Inference to the Best Explanation and Epistemic Circularity, J. Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard
10. In Defense of Rationalism about Abductive Inference, Ali Hasan
          Part IV. Inference to the Best Explanation and Skepticism
11. Does Skepticism Presuppose Explanationism? James R. Beebe
12. Scepticism about Inference to the Best Explanation, Ruth Weintraub
13. External World Skepticism and Inference to the Best Explanation, Susanna Rinard
          Part V. Applications of Inference to the Best Explanation
14. Explanation, Confirmation, and Hempel’s Paradox, William Roche
15. The Spirit of Cromwell’s Rule, Timothy McGrew
16. Bayesianism and IBE: The Case of Individual vs. Group Selection, Leah Henderson
17. Inference to the Best Explanation and the Receipt of Testimony: Testimonial Reductionism Vindicated, Elizabeth Fricker

Recent IBE papers on philsci-archive.pitt.edu

Climenhaga, Nevin (2017) Inference to the Best Explanation Made Incoherent. Journal of Philosophy. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12756/

Climenhaga, Nevin (2016) How Explanation Guides Confirmation. Philosophy of Science.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12755/

Tesic, Marko and Eva, Benjamin and Hartmann, Stephan (2017) Confirmation by Explanation: A Bayesian Justification of IBE.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/13328/

Cabrera, Frank (2017) Can there be a Bayesian explanationism? On the prospects of a productive partnership. Synthese, 194 (4). pp. 1245-1272.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/13438/

Trpin, Borut and Pellert, Max (2017) Inference to the Best Explanation in Uncertain Evidential Situations. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14236/

Dellsén, Finnur (2018) The Heuristic Conception of Inference to the Best Explanation.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/15533/

Dellsén, Finnur (2017) Abductively Robust Inference.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/15535/

Schupbach, Jonah (2019) Conjunctive Explanations and Inference to the Best Explanation.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/15715/

Simplicity

Elliott's Sober, Ockham's Razors: A User's Manual, Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Elliott Sober, "Parsimony arguments in science and philosophy--a test case for naturalism," 2009

Gordon Belot, "Sober as a Judge"
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12117/1/Sober_as_a_Judge.pdf

Unification

Votsis, Ioannis (2015) Unification: Not Just a Thing of Beauty. Theoria. 30 (1). pp. 97-114.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12135/

Ilkka Niiniluoto, "Unification and Confirmation" Theoria, 2015
https://ojs.ehu.eus/index.php/THEORIA/article/view/13084

Myrvold, Wayne C. (2016) "On the Evidential Import of Unification."
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12340/

Dawid: Non-empirical confirmation

Dawid, R. (2013): String Theory and the Scientific Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dawid, Richard (2017) Delimiting the Unconceived.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14230/

Dawid, Richard (2018) The Significance of Non-Empirical Confirmation in Fundamental Physics.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14630/

Menon, Tushar (2018) On the viability of the No Alternatives Argument.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14967/
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/15791/

Cabrera, Frank (2018) String Theory, Non-Empirical Theory Assessment, and the Context of Pursuit. Synthese.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/15154/

Dawid, Richard (2020) Meta-Empirical Confirmation: Addressing
Three Points of Criticism.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16908/

Proofs of Probabilism

Michael G. Titelbaum, Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology. Chapters 8, 9 and 10.

Learning theoretic approaches

Kevin T. Kelly, "Simplicity, Truth, and Probability," in Handbook for the Philosophy of Statistics, Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and Malcolm Forster eds., Dordrecht: Elsevier. 2010.
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/kk3n/homepage/prasanta10.pdf

Konstantin Genin, Kevin T. Kelly, "Learning, Theory Choice, and Belief Revision." (2018) Studia Logica.
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/philosophy/people/faculty/kevin-kelly.html

Schurz, Gerhard (2016) No Free Lunch Theorem, Inductive Skepticism, and the Optimality of Meta-Induction.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12540/

Schurz, Gerhard, Hume's Problem Solved: The Optimality of Meta-Induction, MIT Press, Cambridge/Massachusetts 2019.

Zhao, Kino (2018) A statistical learning approach to a problem of induction.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/15422/

Sterkenburg, Tom F. (2019) The Meta-Inductive Justification of Induction. Episteme.
(Evaluation of Schurz' proposal)

Sterkenburg, Tom F. (2019) The Meta-Inductive Justification of Induction: The Pool of Strategies. Philosophy of Science.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16634/

Principle of indifference

Eva, Benjamin (2019) Principles of Indifference.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16041/

Newton's Principia

Biener, Zvi (2018) Newton’s Regulae Philosophandi. Oxford Handbook of Isaac Newton.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14722/