Alien Abduction: Inference to the Best Explanation and the Management of Testimony
نویسنده
چکیده
In this paper I explore the prospects of applying inference to the Best Explanation (TIBE – sometimes also known as ‘abduction’) to an account of the way we decide whether to accept the word of others (sometimes known as ‘aliens’). IBE is a general account of nondemonstrative or inductive inference, but it has been applied in a particular way to the management of testimony. The governing idea of Testimonial IBE (TIBE) is that a recipient of testimony (‘hearer’) decides whether to believe the claim of the informant (‘speaker’) by considering whether the truth of that claim would figure in the best explanation of the fact that the speaker made it. I begin by introducing the general idea of IBE as an account of many nondemonstrative inferences. Then I make some general remarks about the epistemology of testimony, and especially about the problem of accounting for the way we decide whether to believe what we are told. Third, I suggest how IBE could used to account for this process of testimonial discrimination, the idea of TIBE. In the final two sections I consider the obvious objection to TIBE: it is either trivial or false.
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Reconsidering the role of inference to the best explanation in the epistemology of testimony
In his work on the epistemology of testimony, Peter Lipton developed an account of testimonial inference that aimed at descriptive adequacy as well as justificatory sophistication. According to „testimonial inference to the best explanation‟ (TIBE), we accept what a speaker tells us because the truth of her claim figures in the best explanation of the fact that she made it. In the present paper...
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