Friday, November 6, 2009

Two questions

1) Are we able to give a good justification for inference to the best explanation (or any other principle that justifies our inductive inferences)? If we're not able to give a good justification, then how do we defend our choice to believe in inference to the best explanation? If we simply have to shrug our shoulders and take some things as primitive and given, then can we also take something else as primitive that would give us ethical facts? How can we do this while not also allowing facts about sorcery to gain validity?

(Note: what Enoch did was try to justify inference to the best explanation, and it turned out that his justification of inference to the best explanation also plausibly would include inference to what's necessary for deliberation, and this included some normative/ethical facts. So this question could be restated in the following way: is Enoch's the best justification for inference to the best explanation? It doesn't seem very good. If we can provide a better one, will it also justify ethics? If there is no good justification (which could be OK) then how do we prevent anarchy?)

2) What is the strength of the following argument: in order to believe in inference to the best explanation you have to believe that some explanations are better than others. This means that you have some criteria for what makes an argument best. But why should you believe in the best explanation? Implicit in inference to the best explanation is that you ought to believe in the best...nevermind, this isn't going anywhere. I'll come back to number 2 later.

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