ABSTRACT
The main purpose of the model of Inference to the Best Explanation is to provide a partial solution to the problem of description by giving an illuminating account of the black box mechanism that governs our inductive practices. As we have seen, however, this account also bears on problems of justification. On the one hand, there are questions about whether an explanationist inferential practice is justifiable as a way of discovering truths; these are questions we considered in the last chapter. On the other hand, there are questions about the use of inferences to the best explanation to provide justifications, not just in science and in ordinary life, but even in philosophy. In this chapter and the next, we will consider two such philosophical inferences to the best explanation. One is perhaps the best known argument of this form, the argument for scientific realism on the grounds that the approximate truth of predictively successful scientific theories is the best explanation of that predictive success. The other, the subject of this chapter, is the related but narrower argument that a theory deserves more inductive credit when data are predicted than when they are accommodated, on the grounds that only in the predictive case is the correctness of the theory the best explanation of the fit between theory and evidence.
