ABSTRACT
While most of our inferential lives traffic in the inductive, surprisingly little work has been done to develop an inferentialist approach to inductive vocabulary. In contrast to the detailed inferentialist treatments of deductive vocabulary, inferentialist discussions of inductive vocabulary are mostly programmatic. Admittedly, the induction literature as a whole is not as well-developed as its deductive counterpart. However, this only licenses a more cautious, piecemeal inferentialist approach to inductive vocabularies, rather than widespread avoidance. This chapter extends earlier inferentialist-expressivist treatments of traditional logical, semantic, modal, and representational vocabulary to explanatory vocabulary. Analogous to the inferentialist-expressivist treatment of other logical operators, the essay aims to provide introduction and elimination rules for "best explains." Indeed, by exhibiting a form of detachment, Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) superficially looks like an elimination rule. The reliability of IBE in a particular usage thus depends entirely on the reliability of the material inferences from which it derives.
