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  1. How to Analyse Retrodictive Probabilities in Inference to the Best Explanation.Andrew Holster - manuscript
    IBE ('Inference to the best explanation' or abduction) is a popular and highly plausible theory of how we should judge the evidence for claims of past events based on present evidence. It has been notably developed and supported recently by Meyer following Lipton. I believe this theory is essentially correct. This paper supports IBE from a probability perspective, and argues that the retrodictive probabilities involved in such inferences should be analysed in terms of predictive probabilities and a priori probability ratios (...)
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  2. Dogmatism, Seemings, and Non-Deductive Inferential Justification.Dimitria Gatzia & Berit Brogaard - forthcoming - In K. McCain, S. Stapleford & M. Setup (eds.), Seemings: New Arguments, New Angles. Routledge.
    Dogmatism holds that an experience or seeming that p can provide prima facie immediate justification for believing p in virtue of its phenomenology. Dogmatism about perceptual justification has appealed primarily to proponents of representational theories of perceptual experience. Call dogmatism that takes perceptual experience to be representational "representational phenomenal dogmatism." As we show, phenomenal seemings play a crucial role in dogmatism of this kind. Despite its conventional appeal to representational theorists, dogmatism is not by definition committed to any particular view (...)
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  3. The Art of Abduction. By Igor Douven. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022. Pp. xx + 349. Price $50.00.). [REVIEW]Mousa Mohammadian - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3):881-884.
    One of the many notable virtues of Igor Douven's The Art of Abduction is that it is open access. Since a well-written chapter-by-chapter overview of the book is.
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  4. The Reliability of Memory: An Argument from the Armchair.Ali Hasan - 2021 - Episteme 18 (2):142-159.
    The “problem of memory” in epistemology is concerned with whether and how we could have knowledge, or at least justification, for trusting our apparent memories. I defend an inductive solution—more precisely, an abductive solution—to the problem. A natural worry is that any such solution would be circular, for it would have to depend on memory. I argue that belief in the reliability of memory can be justified from the armchair, without relying on memory. The justification is, roughly, that my having (...)
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  5. Appearance and Explanation: Phenomenal Explanationism in Epistemology.Kevin McCain & Luca Moretti - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by Luca Moretti.
    Phenomenal Conservatism (the view that an appearance that p gives one prima facie justification for believing that p) is a promising, and popular, internalist theory of epistemic justification. Despite its popularity, it faces numerous objections and challenges. For instance, epistemologists have argued that Phenomenal Conservatism is incompatible with Bayesianism, is afflicted by bootstrapping and cognitive penetration problems, does not guarantee that epistemic justification is a stable property, does not provide an account of defeat, and is not a complete theory of (...)
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  6. Naturalness as a Constraint on Priors.Darren Bradley - 2020 - Mind 129 (513):179-203.
    Many epistemological problems can be solved by the objective Bayesian view that there are rationality constraints on priors, that is, inductive probabilities. But attempts to work out these constraints have run into such serious problems that many have rejected objective Bayesianism altogether. I argue that the epistemologist should borrow the metaphysician’s concept of naturalness and assign higher priors to more natural hypotheses.
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  7. Kevin McCain and Ted Poston’s Best Explanations.Frank Cabrera - 2020 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (2):1-10.
    In this critical notice, I focus my attention on the chapters that deal with the explanationist response to skepticism.
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  8. Forgetting memory skepticism.Matthew Frise & Kevin McCain - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2):253-263.
    Memory skepticism denies our memory beliefs could have any notable epistemic good. One route to memory skepticism is to challenge memory’s epistemic trustworthiness, that is, its functioning in a way necessary for it to provide epistemic justification. In this paper we develop and respond to this challenge. It could threaten memory in such a way that we altogether lack doxastic attitudes. If it threatens memory in this way, then the challenge is importantly self-defeating. If it does not threaten memory in (...)
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  9. In Defense of the Explanationist Response to Skepticism.Kevin McCain - 2019 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 9 (1):38-50.
    _ Source: _Page Count 13 A promising response to the threat of external world skepticism involves arguing that our commonsense view of the world best explains the sensory experiences that we have. Since our commonsense view of the world best explains our evidence, we are justified in accepting this commonsense view of the world. Despite the plausibility of this Explanationist Response, it has recently come under attack. James Beebe has argued that only a version of the Explanationist Response that provides (...)
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  10. Skepticism and Spatial Objects.Ali Hasan - 2018 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 8 (2):73-95.
    I defend external world realism. I assume that the principle of inference to the best explanation is justified: roughly, a hypothesis that provides a better explanation of the total evidence is more probable than one that does not. I argue that the existence of a world of spatial objects provides a systematic explanation of the spatial contents of visual experience, and that it provides a better explanation than traditional skeptical hypotheses. This paper thus pursues the explanationist strategy of Laurence BonJour (...)
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  11. Edging Toward ‘Reasonably’ Good Corporate Governance.Donald Nordberg - 2018 - Philosophy of Management 17 (3):353-371.
    Over four decades, research and policy have created layers of understandings in the quest for "good" corporate governance. The corporate excesses of the 1970s sparked a search for market mechanisms and disclosure to empower shareholders. The UK-focused problems of the 1990s prompted board-centric, structural approaches, while the fall of Enron and many other companies in the early 2000s heightened emphasis on director independence and professionalism. With the financial crisis of 2007–09, however, came a turn in some policy approaches and in (...)
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  12. Does Skepticism Presuppose Explanationism?James R. Beebe - 2017 - In Kevin McCain & Ted Poston (eds.), Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation. Oxford University Press. pp. 173-187.
    A common response to radical skeptical challenges to our knowledge of the external world has been that there are explanatory reasons (e.g., simplicity, coherence, explanatory power, conservatism) for favoring commonsense explanations of our sensory experiences over skeptical explanations. Despite the degree of visibility this class of response has enjoyed, it has often been viewed with skepticism [sic] by the epistemological community because of concerns about the epistemic merits of explanatory reasoning. I argue that skeptical challenges that employ skeptical hypotheses presuppose (...)
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  13. In Defense of Rationalism about Abductive Inference.Ali Hasan - 2017 - In Ted Poston & Kevin McCain (eds.), Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation. Oxford University Press.
    Laurence BonJour and more recently James Beebe have argued that the best way to defend the claim that abduction or inference to the best explanation is epistemically justified is the rationalist view that it is justified a priori. However, rationalism about abduction faces a number of challenges. This chapter focuses on one particular, highly influential objection, that there is no interpretation of probability available which is compatible with rationalism about abduction. The rationalist who wants to maintain a strong connection between (...)
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  14. Skepticism and Elegance.Kevin McCain - 2016 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (1):30-43.
    _ Source: _Page Count 14 Jonathan Vogel has argued in support of an explanationist response to skepticism in several works. Central to this explanationist response is the fact that our non-skeptical view of the world is a better explanation of our experiences than its skeptical rivals. Despite the plausibility of this response to skepticism, it is not without its critics. Recently, Matthew Gifford has argued that Vogel’s response has problems on two fronts. First, Gifford argues that Vogel’s strategy for showing (...)
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  15. Skepticism and Elegance.Kevin McCain - 2016 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (1):30-43.
    _ Source: _Page Count 14 Jonathan Vogel has argued in support of an explanationist response to skepticism in several works. Central to this explanationist response is the fact that our non-skeptical view of the world is a better explanation of our experiences than its skeptical rivals. Despite the plausibility of this response to skepticism, it is not without its critics. Recently, Matthew Gifford has argued that Vogel’s response has problems on two fronts. First, Gifford argues that Vogel’s strategy for showing (...)
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  16. Rationalist Responses to Skepticism: A New Puzzle.Tim Willenken - 2015 - Philosophers' Imprint 15.
    Most promising responses to skepticism fall into “Moorean” or “rationalist” camps. Mooreans believe that some apparently circular forms of reasoning allow us to have justification to believe that skeptical hypotheses are false. Rationalists believe that we have a priori justification to believe that skeptical hypotheses are false. It can seem that anti-skeptics are stuck choosing between fishy circular reasoning and mysterious a priori justification. I present a new difficulty for rationalism by focusing on skeptical scenarios wherein our faculties of a (...)
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  17. Skeptical Thoughts Concerning Explanationism and Skepticism.Clayton Littlejohn - 2014 - Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 1 (1):77-87.
    According to the explanationist, we can rely on inference to best explanation to justifiably believe familiar skeptical hypotheses are false. On this view, commonsense beliefs about the existence and character of familiar, medium-sized dry goods provides the best explanation of our evidence and so justifies our belief that we're not brains-in-vats. This explanationist approach seems prima facie plausible until we press the explanationist to tell us what the data is that we're trying to explain by appeal to our beliefs about (...)
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  18. The Problem of Epistemic Luck for Naturalists.R. Zachary Manis - 2014 - Philo 17 (1):59-76.
    According to a (once) venerable tradition, our knowledge of the external world is crucially dependent on divine favor: our ability to obtain knowledge of the world around us is made possible by God’s having so ordered things. I argue that this view, despite its unpopularity among con­temporary philosophers, is supported by a certain inference to the best explanation: namely, it provides an effective way of reconciling two widely held beliefs that, on the assumption of naturalism, appear incompatible: (1) that knowledge (...)
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  19. Global Scepticism, Underdetermination and Metaphysical Possibility.Luca Moretti - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (2):381-403.
    I focus on a key argument for global external world scepticism resting on the underdetermination thesis: the argument according to which we cannot know any proposition about our physical environment because sense evidence for it equally justifies some sceptical alternative (e.g. the Cartesian demon conjecture). I contend that the underdetermination argument can go through only if the controversial thesis that conceivability is per se a source of evidence for metaphysical possibility is true. I also suggest a reason to doubt that (...)
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  20. Skepticism and elegance: problems for the abductivist reply to Cartesian skepticism.Matthew B. Gifford - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 164 (3):685-704.
    Some philosophers argue that we are justified in rejecting skepticism because it is explanatorily inferior to more commonsense hypotheses about the world. Focusing on the work of Jonathan Vogel, I show that this “abductivist” or “inference to the best explanation” response rests on an impoverished explanatory framework which ignores the explanatory gap between an object's having certain properties and its appearing to have those properties. Once this gap is appreciated, I argue, the abductivist strategy is defeated.
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  21. Antiskeptische Trittbrettfahrer des semantischen Externalismus.Jochen Briesen - 2011 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 65 (4):100-122.
    Die philosophische Skepsis bezweifelt argumentativ, dass Menschen über Wissen verfügen. Eine interessante und viel beachtete Reaktion auf diese Skepsis basiert auf dem semantischen Externalismus. Obwohl die antiskeptische Strategie des Externalismus im Laufe der Jahre entscheident verbessert wurde, krankt sie in den Augen vieler Philosophen immer noch an einer stark beschränkten Reichweite: Sie ist nur hinsichtlich ganz bestimmter Varianten skeptischer Argumentation erfolgreich – durch geschickte Modifikation des skeptischen Arguments ist der Skeptiker in der Lage, sein Argument gegen den externalistischen Angriff zu (...)
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  22. Peacocke’s A Priori Arguments Against Scepticism.B. J. C. Madison - 2011 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 83 (1):1-8.
    In The Realm of Reason (2004), Christopher Peacocke develops a “generalized rationalism” concerning, among other things, what it is for someone to be “entitled”, or justified, in forming a given belief. In the course of his discussion, Peacocke offers two arguments to the best explanation that aim to undermine scepticism and establish a justification for our belief in the reliability of sense perception, respectively. If sound, these ambitious arguments would answer some of the oldest and most vexing epistemological problems. In (...)
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  23. BonJour on explanation and skepticism.Jonathan Vogel - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (4):413-421.
    Laurence BonJour, among others, has argued that inference to the best explanation allows us to reject skeptical hypotheses in favor of our common-sense view of the world. BonJour considers several skeptical hypotheses, specifically: our experiences arise by mere chance, uncaused; the simple hypothesis which states merely that our experiences are caused unveridically; and an elaborated hypothesis which explains in detail how our unveridical experiences are brought about. A central issue is whether the coherence of one’s experience makes that experience more (...)
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  24. The Abductivist Reply to Skepticism.James R. Beebe - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (3):605-636.
    Abductivists claim that explanatory considerations (e.g., simplicity, parsimony, explanatory breadth, etc.) favor belief in the external world over skeptical hypotheses involving evil demons and brains in vats. After showing how most versions of abductivism succumb fairly easily to obvious and fatal objections, I explain how rationalist versions of abductivism can avoid these difficulties. I then discuss the most pressing challenges facing abductivist appeals to the a priori and offer suggestions on how to overcome them.
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  25. Skepticism, Externalism, and Inference to the Best Explanation.Jochen Briesen - 2008 - Abstracta 4 (1):5-26.
    This paper focuses on a combination of the antiskeptical strategies offered by semantic externalism and the inference to the best explanation. I argue that the most difficult problems of the two strategies can be solved, if the strategies are combined: The strategy offered by semantic externalism is successful against standard skeptical brain-in-a-vat arguments. But the strategy is ineffective, if the skeptical argument is referring to the recent-envatment scenario. However, by focusing on the scenario of recent envatment the most difficult problems (...)
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  26. Skepticism and the Foundations of Empirical Justification.Ali Hasan - 2008 - Dissertation, University of Washington
    A central project of traditional epistemology is to address skeptical questions and concerns regarding the rationality or epistemic justification of our empirical beliefs, especially beliefs regarding the external world, with the aim of understanding what makes it possible for such beliefs to have or lack justification, and of determining how much justification we have. A prominent anti-skeptical view in the history of epistemology, a view I shall call classical foundationalism, can be distinguished from other more contemporary versions of foundationalism in (...)
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  27. BonJour’s Abductivist Reply to Skepticism.James R. Beebe - 2007 - Philosophia 35 (2):181-196.
    The abductivist reply to skepticism is the view that commonsense explanations of the patterns and regularities that appear in our sensory experiences should be rationally preferred to skeptical explanations of those same patterns and regularities on the basis of explanatory considerations. In this article I critically examine Laurence BonJour’s rationalist version of the abductivist position. After explaining why BonJour’s account is more defensible than other versions of the view, I argue that the notion of probability he relies upon is deeply (...)
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  28. A Refutation of Skepticism via Inference to the Best Explanation.Quee Nelson - 2007 - Philosopher's Carnival #82.
  29. The matrix as metaphysics.David J. Chalmers - 2005 - In Christopher Grau (ed.), Philosophers Explore the Matrix. Oxford University Press. pp. 132.
    The Matrix presents a version of an old philosophical fable: the brain in a vat. A disembodied brain is floating in a vat, inside a scientist’s laboratory. The scientist has arranged that the brain will be stimulated with the same sort of inputs that a normal embodied brain receives. To do this, the brain is connected to a giant computer simulation of a world. The simulation determines which inputs the brain receives. When the brain produces outputs, these are fed back (...)
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  30. The refutation of skepticism.Jonathan Vogel - 2005 - In Steup Matthias & Sosa Ernest (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology. Blackwell. pp. 72--84.
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  31. Skepticism, abductivism, and the explanatory gap.Ram Neta - 2004 - Philosophical Issues 14 (1):296-325.
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  32. Michael Williams And The Hypothetical World.E. Brandon - 2002 - Minerva 6:151-161.
    Michael Williams has frequently considered and rejected approaches to “our knowledge of the external world”that see it as the best explanation for certain features of experience.This paper examines the salience of his position to approaches such as Mackie’s that do not deny thepresentational directness of ordinary experience but do permit a gap between how things appear and how theyare that allows for sceptical doubts.Williams’ main argument is that, to do justice to its place in a foundationalist strategy, the external world (...)
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  33. What is a Situation?Tom Burke - 2000 - History and Philosophy of Logic 21 (2):95-113.
    This paper examines the role of ?situations? in John Dewey's philosophy of logic. To do this properly it is necessary to contrast Dewey's conception of experience and mentality with views characteristic of modern epistemology. The primary difference is that, rather than treat experience as peripheral and or external to mental functions (reason, etc.), we should treat experience as a field in and as a part of which thinking takes place. Experience in this broad sense subsumes theory and fact, hypothesis and (...)
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  34. Cartesian skepticism and the inference to the best explanation.Jonathan Vogel - 1998 - In Alcoff Linda (ed.), Epistemology: The Big Questions. Blackwell. pp. 352--9.
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  35. Dismissing skeptical possibilities.Jonathan Vogel - 1993 - Philosophical Studies 70 (3):235 - 250.
  36. Skepticism and reasoning to the best explanation.Richard Fumerton - 1992 - Philosophical Issues 2 (Rationality in Epistemology):149-169.
  37. The exorcist's nightmare: A reply to Crispin Wright.Thomas Tymoczko & Jonathan Vogel - 1992 - Mind 101 (403):543-552.
    Crispin Wright tried to refute classical 'Cartesian' skepticism contending that its core argument is extendible to a reductio ad absurdum (_Mind<D>, 100, 87-116, 1991). We show both that Wright is mistaken and that his mistakes are philosophically illuminating. Wright's 'best version' of skepticism turns on a concept of warranted belief. By his definition, many of our well-founded beliefs about the external world and mathematics would not be warranted. Wright's position worsens if we take 'warranted belief' to be implicitly defined by (...)
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  38. One World and the Many Sciences: A Defence of Physicalism.A. Melnyk & Andrew Melnyk - 1991 - Dissertation, Oxford University
    The subject of this thesis is physicalism, understood not as some particular doctrine pertaining narrowly to the philosophy of mind, but rather as a quite general metaphysical claim to the effect that everything is, or is fundamentally, physical. Thus physicalism explicates the thought that in some sense physics is the basic science. The aim of the thesis is to defend a particular brand of physicalism, which I call eliminative type physicalism. It claims, roughly, that every property is a physical property, (...)
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  39. Cartesian Skepticism and Inference to the Best Explanation.Jonathan Vogel - 1990 - Journal of Philosophy 87 (11):658-666.
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  40. Philosophical explanations and sceptical intuitions.Frederick W. Kroon - 1986 - Philosophical Quarterly 36 (144):391-395.
  41. A Few Words about Knowledge, Scepticism, and Entailment.Charles B. Daniels - 1978 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (2):341 - 342.
    In a recent article entitled “Scepticism and Knowing That One Knows”, Michael Hall poses a sceptical argument based upon two rules of inference:where ‘Kp’ stands for ‘it is known that p'. The argument goes:Hall attacks R2, but he says little about R1. I wish to add a few words of warning about R1 as well.
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  42. On the relation of some empirical propositions to their evidence.Casimir Lewy - 1944 - Mind 53 (212):289-313.
  43. Induction of an external world.Wilmot V. Metcalf - 1938 - Philosophy of Science 5 (3):354-358.
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  44. Bertrand Russells „Erkenntnis der Außenwelt“.Hugo Bergmann - 1920 - Kant Studien 25 (1):50.
  45. Inference to the best explanation and the challenge of skepticism.Bryan C. Appley - unknown
    In this dissertation I consider the problem of external world skepticism and attempts at providing an argument to the best explanation against it. In chapter one I consider several different ways of formulating the crucial skeptical argument, settling on an argument that centers on the question of whether we're justified in believing propositions about the external world. I then consider and reject several options for getting around this issue which I take to be inadequate. I finally conclude that the best (...)
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