ABSTRACT
We are forever inferring and explaining, forming new beliefs about the way things are and explaining why things are as we have found them to be. These two activities are central to our cognitive lives, and we usually perform them remarkably well. But it is one thing to be good at doing something, quite another to understand how it is done or why it is done so well. It is easy to ride a bicycle, but hard to describe how it is done; it is easy to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical strings of words in one’s native tongue, but hard to describe the principles that underlie those judgments. In the cases of inference and explanation, the contrast between what we can do and what we can describe is stark, for we are remarkably bad at principled description. We seem to have been designed to perform the activities, but not to analyze or to defend them. Still, epistemologists do the best they can with their limited cognitive endowment, trying to describe and justify our inferential and explanatory practices.
