Whenever I’ve seen people invoking Inference to the Best Explanation to justify a conclusion (as opposed to philosophising about the logic of argument), they have given no reason why their preferred explanation is the Best, they have just pronounced it so. A Bayesian reasoner can (or should be able to) show their work, but the ItoBE reasoner has no work to show.
IBE arguments don’t exactly work that way. The argument is usually that one person is arguing that some hypothesis H is the best available explanation for the evidence E in question, and if the other person agrees with that, it is hard for them to not also agree that H is probably true (or something like that). Most people already accept IBE as an inference rule. They wouldn’t say “Yes, the existence of an external world seems to be the best available explanation for our experiences, but I still don’t believe the external world exists” nor “Yes, the best available explanation for the missing cheese is that a mouse ate it, but I still don’t believe a mouse ate the cheese”. And if they do disagree about H being the best available explanation, they usually feel compelled to argue that some H’ is a better explanation.
Without an account of that, IBE is the claim that something being the best available explanation is evidence that it is true.
That being said, we typically judge the goodness of a possible explanation by a number of explanatory virtues like simplicity, empirical fit, consistency, internal coherence, external coherence (with other theories), consilience, unification etc. To clarify and justify those virtues on other (including Bayesian) grounds is something epistemologists work on.
Whenever I’ve seen people invoking Inference to the Best Explanation to justify a conclusion (as opposed to philosophising about the logic of argument), they have given no reason why their preferred explanation is the Best, they have just pronounced it so. A Bayesian reasoner can (or should be able to) show their work, but the ItoBE reasoner has no work to show.
These can often be operationalized ‘How much of the variance in the output do you predict is controlled by your proposed input?’
IBE arguments don’t exactly work that way. The argument is usually that one person is arguing that some hypothesis H is the best available explanation for the evidence E in question, and if the other person agrees with that, it is hard for them to not also agree that H is probably true (or something like that). Most people already accept IBE as an inference rule. They wouldn’t say “Yes, the existence of an external world seems to be the best available explanation for our experiences, but I still don’t believe the external world exists” nor “Yes, the best available explanation for the missing cheese is that a mouse ate it, but I still don’t believe a mouse ate the cheese”. And if they do disagree about H being the best available explanation, they usually feel compelled to argue that some H’ is a better explanation.
What is the measure of goodness? How does one judge what is the “better” explanation? Without an account of that, what is IBE?
Without an account of that, IBE is the claim that something being the best available explanation is evidence that it is true.
That being said, we typically judge the goodness of a possible explanation by a number of explanatory virtues like simplicity, empirical fit, consistency, internal coherence, external coherence (with other theories), consilience, unification etc. To clarify and justify those virtues on other (including Bayesian) grounds is something epistemologists work on.