Abduction: The Glory and Scandal of Philosophy?
Duration: 47 mins 23 secs
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About this item
| Description: | A talk given by Finnur Dellsén at the Moral Sciences Club on 10th October 2023 |
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| Created: | 2024-01-18 15:16 |
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| Collection: | Moral Sciences Club |
| Publisher: | University of Cambridge |
| Copyright: | Faculty of Philosophy |
| Language: | eng (English) |
| Distribution: |
World
(downloadable)
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| Explicit content: | No |
| Abstract: | C.D. Broad referred to inductive reasoning as "the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy“. Broad‘s point was that while scientists routinely use various forms of inductive reasoning, philosophers have not yet provided any convincing justification for doing so. I suggest that an analogous claim is true of abductive reasoning in philosophy: while philosophers routinely use abductive reasoning, e.g. Inference to the Best Explanation, we philosophers have not yet provided any convincing justification for doing so. In particular, I discuss four problems that arise for abductive reasoning in philosophy: (i) all available explanatory hypotheses may be false; (ii) there may be multiple similarly-plausible rival explanations which undermine each other; (iii) the ‘evidence’ to be explained may be false or uncertain; and (iv) we may have no way to estimate whether the ‘explanatory virtues’ are truth-conducive. In response to these problems, I argue that we should reconceive of the structure of abductive reasoning in philosophy so that, in most cases, it licenses a substantially more modest type of conclusion than it has previously been thought to do. |
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