ABSTRACT
This inquiry into Inference to the Best Explanation has been an attempt at both articulation and defense. I began by distinguishing the problem of description from the problem of justification and by making a case for the importance and autonomy of the descriptive project. The history of epistemology has been driven by skeptical arguments, and this has resulted in what is perhaps an excessive focus on justification and a relative neglect of the apparently more mundane project of principled description. I also urged a certain conception of the descriptive project, one that focuses on the deductive underdetermination of our inferences by the evidence available to us and attempts to discover the black box mechanisms that we actually employ to generate determinate inferences. The model of Inference to the Best Explanation is to be seen as a putative description of one of these mechanisms, perhaps a central one.
