Explanation and Justification

I'm reading Peter Lipton's book on IBE right now, and it's a good read with nice chapters on induction and explanation.

If you think about it inference to the best explanation is a really interesting principle, if it's used for justification of inferences. Meaning, consider the following: I see water coming out of my wall, the best explanation of this is that a pipe has burst. Therefore I am justified in concluding that a pipe has burst. But what justifies this conclusion? IBE. So inference to the best explanation plays a justifying role. We then ask, "What justifies IBE?" Well, that is what I've been trying to do. Enoch and Shechter give an account of epistemic justification that allows for pragmatic considerations (of a very specific type) to play a role in justifying our basic principles, such as IBE. I think that this runs into problems that are pretty big, but it is a subtle argument with intuitive appeal.

Another attempt, which occurred to me, is to simply take certain beliefs as primitive. IBE is unjustified, or justified by things that it justifies. This suggests a coherentist picture of some sort. Enoch is decidedly working in a foundationalist epistemology, one that thinks that justification is linear and asymmetric.

What else is there? You might think that the notions of explanation and justification are simply linked--maybe the reason why inference to the best explanation is justified is because what you're really doing is inferring to the best justification, so that IBE is never leading you to believe something that isn't justified. But this doesn't work, since explanation is actually quite different from justification. This comes out well in Lipton. One way to see this is that we have a much easier time believing that that certain beliefs explain themselves or dont' require explanations, while it's much harder to come across beliesf that seem to justify themselves, or require no justification. Also, explanation seems to FAR outstrip knowledge. In fact, we only begin to seek an explanation of a fact after we are secure in our knowledge that the fact is true! So it's quite a substantial claim to say that explanation guides justification, as IBE seems to do (I think). Obviously, explanation cannot be all there is to justification. Is explanation a specific type of justification? Er, I'm confused.