NDLI: On the Possibility of Inference to the Best Explanation

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Glymour, Clark
Copyright Year	2011
Abstract	Various proposals have suggested that an adequate explanatory theory should reduce the number or the cardinality of the set of logically independent claims that need be accepted in order to entail a body of data. A (and perhaps the only) well-formed proposal of this kind is William Kneale’s: an explanatory theory should be finitely axiomatizable but it’s set of logical consequences in the data language should not be finitely axiomatizable. Craig and Vaught showed that Kneale theories (almost) always exist for any recursively enumerable but not finitely axiomatizable set of data sentences in a first order language with identity. Kneale’s criterion underdetermines explanation even given all possible data in the data language; gratuitous axioms may be “tacked on.” Define a Kneale theory, T, to be logically minimal if it is deducible from every Kneale theory (in the vocabulary of T) that entails the same statements in the data language as does T. If they exist, minimal Kneale theories are candidates for best explanations: they are “bold” in a sense close to Popper’s; some minimal Kneale theory is true if any Kneale theory is true; the minimal Kneale theory that is data equivalent to any given Kneale theory is unique; and no Kneale theory is more probable than some minimal Kneale theory. I show that under the Craig-Vaught conditions, no minimal Kneale theories exist.
Starting Page	461
Ending Page	469
Page Count	9
File Format	PDF
ISSN	00223611
Journal	Journal of Philosophical Logic
Volume Number	41
Issue Number	2
e-ISSN	15730433
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2011-05-03
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Explanation Finite axiomatizability Minimal theories Logic
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Philosophy

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