ABSTRACT
We have just seen one way Inference to the Best Explanation can be used to provide a justification for a particular aspect of our inductive practices. We tend to give more credit to successful predictions than to accommodations, and the fudging explanation shows how this preference can be justified, by showing how it follows from a more general preference for the best explanation. Accommodations are often worth less than predictions, because only they have to face the possibility that the best explanation of the fit between theory and data is that the theoretical system was fudged. In this chapter, we will consider a second overarching application of Inference to the Best Explanation to a problem of justification, but now what is to be justified is not just one rather special aspect of our inductive practices, but the general claim that they take us towards the truth.
