Abductive Reasoning in Science

Dellsén
To come
Philosophy of Science
Abductive Reasoning in Science

Abductive Reasoning
in Science
About the Series Series Editor

This series of Elements in Philosophy of Jacob Stegenga
Science provides an extensive overview University of
of the themes, topics and debates which Cambridge
constitute the philosophy of science.
Distinguished specialists provide an Finnur Dellsén
up-to-date summary of the results of
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009353199 Published online by Cambridge University Press

current research on their topics, as well
as offering their own take on those topics
and drawing original conclusions.
Cover image: BSIP / Contributor/

Universal Images Group/
Getty Images ISSN 2517-7273 (online)
ISSN 2517-7265 (print)
Elements in Philosophy of Science
edited by
Jacob Stegenga
University of Cambridge
ABDUCTIVE REASONING
IN SCIENCE
Finnur Dellsén
University of Iceland, Inland Norway University of
Applied Sciences and University of Oslo
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467
Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

a department of the University of Cambridge.
We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009500524
DOI: 10.1017/9781009353199
© Finnur Dellsén 2024
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions
of relevant collective licensing agreements, with the exception of the
Creative Commons version the link for which is provided below,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of
Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
An online version of this work is published at doi.org/10.1017/9781009353199
under a Creative Commons Open Access license CC-BY-NC 4.0 which permits
re-use, distribution and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial
purposes providing appropriate credit to the original work is given
and any changes made are indicated. To view a copy of this license visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
When citing this work, please include a reference to the DOI 10.1017/9781009353199
First published 2024
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-009-50052-4 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-009-35318-2 Paperback
ISSN 2517-7273 (online)
ISSN 2517-7265 (print)
Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence
or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this
publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will
remain, accurate or appropriate.
Elements in Philosophy of Science
DOI: 10.1017/9781009353199
First published online: June 2024
Finnur Dellsén
University of Iceland, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences and
University of Oslo
Author for correspondence: Finnur Dellsén, [email protected]
Abstract: In abductive reasoning, scientific theories are evaluated on the

basis of how well they would explain the available evidence. There are a
number of subtly different accounts of this type of reasoning, most of
which are inspired by the popular slogan “Inference to the Best
Explanation.” However, these accounts disagree about exactly how to spell
out the slogan so as to avoid various problems for abductive reasoning.
This Element aims, firstly, to give an opinionated overview both of the
many accounts of abductive reasoning that have been proposed and the
problems that have motivated them; and, secondly, to critically evaluate
these accounts in a way that points toward a systematic view of the nature
and purpose of abductive reasoning in science. This title is also available as
Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Keywords: abduction, inference to the best explanation, scientific reasoning,

explanatory virtues, alternative explanations
© Finnur Dellsén 2024

ISBNs: 9781009500524 (HB), 9781009353182 (PB), 9781009353199 (OC)
ISSNs: 2517-7273 (online), 2517-7265 (print)
Contents
Introduction 1
1 A Brief History of Abductive Reasoning 3
2 Contemporary Accounts of Abductive Reasoning 15
3 Why Prefer Explanatory Hypotheses? 31
4 Is Abductive Reasoning Irrational? 46
Conclusion 63
References 66
Abductive Reasoning in Science 1
Introduction
Scientists are constantly engaged in various forms of reasoning, arguing that
because this is the case, that must be the case. Some of these forms of reason-
ing are from what may broadly be called data to what may broadly be called
theory. The data are things like observations, survey statistics, and experimental
results. A theory is typically a more ambitious type of claim that often gener-
alizes, expands, or otherwise “goes beyond” the data, such as by specifying
what causes some type of event. For example, by the early twentieth century
there was already a great deal of observational data suggesting that lung cancer
is more frequent among tobacco smokers than among non-smokers. From this
data most scientists eventually inferred that smoking causes lung cancer, and
so that one may reduce one’s chances of getting lung cancer by refraining from
smoking.
The term “abductive reasoning” refers, at least for the purposes of this Ele-
ment, to a specific way of engaging in data-to-theory reasoning. In particular,
it refers to reasoning in which theories are evaluated at least partly on the basis
of how well they would, if true, explain the available data. To see how this is
supposed to work, consider how one might conclude that smoking causes lung
cancer in the above example. The theory that smoking causes lung cancer seems
to provide a good explanation, especially compared to rival explanations, of the
observed difference in lung cancer frequency among smokers and nonsmokers.
In particular, the theory that smoking causes lung cancer arguably provides a
much better explanation of this data than various other theories one might think
of, such as that the correlation between smoking and lung cancer is a mere
coincidence, or that having lung cancer somehow causes smoking.1 On these

grounds, it seems reasonable to conclude that smoking causes lung cancer.
Abductive reasoning is arguably not only commonplace in the sciences, but
also widespread in other situations in which we make inferences about the
underlying explanations, such as the causes or grounds, of the things in our
immediate environment. Some philosophers even claim that all cogent data-
to-theory reasoning is abductive reasoning – that is, that reasoning from data
to theory should always involve evaluating how well various theories would
explain the data (e.g., Lycan, 1988). According to this view, even the most
basic generalizations and predictions from past experience – such as inferring
that the sun will rise tomorrow morning because it has risen every morning
thus far – involve abductive reasoning as well, albeit in an implicit and indirect
1 This latter type of explanation was seriously proposed by R.A. Fisher (1959), who suggested
that having lung cancer might cause an unconscious irritation or pain, which in turn causes
people to smoke.
2 Philosophy of Science
way. Furthermore, several philosophers have argued that abductive reasoning

is essential to philosophy itself – that philosophical theories should be evalu-
ated on the basis of how well they explain some philosophical “data,” such as
our pre-theoretic judgments about hypothetical cases (e.g., Williamson, 2016).
Given the apparent significance of abductive reasoning, it should come as no
surprise that philosophers of science have studied the nature of abductive rea-
soning intensely. In the past few decades, a number of subtly different accounts
of abductive reasoning have emerged – many, though not all, of which have
been inspired by Gilbert Harman’s (1965) slogan “Inference to the Best Expla-
nation.” Roughly, Harman’s idea was that one may infer a theory from some
collection of data just in case the theory provides a better explanation of the data
than any competing theory that one has considered, where inference involves
coming to accept or believe that the theory is true. However, the popularity
of Harman’s slogan obscures how much disagreement there is about exactly
how to understand it. A number of very serious, if not devastating, objections
have prompted various philosophers to reconsider key elements of the slogan.
Indeed, there are now prominent accounts on which Inference to the Best Expla-
nation is not viewed as a form of inference, some accounts on which it does not
involve inferring to the best explanation, and yet others on which one need not
infer to an explanation at all.2
This Element has two main aims. The first is to give a systematic and opin-
ionated overview of the current state of philosophical thinking about abductive
reasoning. This involves not just discussing the various accounts of abductive
reasoning that have been proposed, but also the many objections to previous
accounts which have motivated philosophers to develop them. As this indi-

cates, I will approach the topic in a problem-based manner, in the sense that
the various accounts of abductive reasoning will be presented as responses to
specific problems. However, some problems and accounts will not be discussed
in detail, or indeed at all. This is partly for reasons of space and partly to keep
the discussion accessible, since some important contributions to the topic are
rather technical and require familiarity with various formal methods that would
need to be introduced in an Element of their own.3
The second aim of this Element is to gradually construct, by drawing lessons
from the various problems and accounts to be discussed, a systematic view of
2 This curious situation evokes Voltaire’s (1759, ch. 70) quip that the Holy Roman Empire was
“in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
3 Happily, there is another Element, Bayesianism and Scientific Reasoning (Schupbach, 2022),
that covers much of the ground I have in mind here, especially recent discussions of formal
measures of explanatory power and how they could be leveraged in an account of abductive
reasoning.
the nature and purpose of abductive reasoning. This view is difficult to sum-
marize briefly at this stage, but at a very general level it holds that abductive
reasoning is a collection of inferential strategies that serves to approximate dif-
ferent forms of probabilistic reasoning. Depending on the exact nature of the
probabilistic reasoning that is being approximated, the inferential strategy may
be more or less demanding. In particular, I will suggest that some of the prob-
abilistic conclusions we wish to reach are quite modest, for example, when
determining which theory to investigate further; in those cases, abductive rea-
soning is not very demanding. In other cases, we may want abductive reasoning
to warrant a reasonably high level of probabilistic confidence that a theory
is true; in those cases, abductive reasoning is an evidentially demanding and
temporally extended process that may not deliver the desired conclusion at all.
The rest of this Element is structured as follows. Section 1 briefly summa-
rizes the history of philosophical thought about abductive reasoning from the
advent of modern science to the middle of the twentieth century. Section 2
surveys contemporary accounts of abductive reasoning, based on a three-fold
distinction between accounts that construe abductive reasoning as (i) a form
of inference, (ii) a probabilistic process, or (iii) both of the above. Section 3
focuses on the fact that in abductive reasoning, one is told to infer or prefer the
best explanation. But what reason, if any, is there for scientists to prefer “better”
explanations in this way? As we shall see, there are several quite different types
of answers to this question, leading to different ideas about the role of abduc-
tive reasoning in science. Section 4 then discusses a different set of problems
for accounts of abductive reasoning, having to do with whether abductive rea-
soning is somehow irrational or incoherent in some cases. In particular, it has

been suggested that some common accounts of abductive reasoning imply that
one should sometimes infer theories that are, by one’s own lights, very likely to
be false; or that one should assign probabilities to theories in ways that are, by
one’s own lights, demonstrably irrational. Finally, Section 5 weaves together
various threads from the previous sections to briefly present a holistic view
of abductive reasoning that, I hope, avoids the various problems for abductive
reasoning discussed in this Element while retaining the core insight that much
of scientific reasoning is governed by explanatory considerations.
1 A Brief History of Abductive Reasoning

This section introduces the topic of this Element by way of a brief historical
overview of philosophical thinking about abductive reasoning. In particular, we
will look at examples of scientists and philosophers who deployed or implic-
itly endorsed forms of abductive reasoning, such as Charles Darwin and René
Descartes (§1.1); discuss Charles S. Peirce’s pioneering work on the form of

reasoning he dubbed “Abduction” (§1.2); consider the extent to which the
“hypothetico-deductive model” is a forerunner to abductive reasoning (§1.3);
and, finally, examine Gilbert Harman’s seminal notion of “Inference to the Best
Explanation” (§1.4). This overview sets the stage for the next section, in which
more recent (and arguably more sophisticated) accounts of abductive reasoning
are surveyed.
1.1 The Historical Roots of Abductive Reasoning

As is so often the case with methodological novelties, abductive reasoning
seems to have emerged first as an implicit scientific practice rather than an
explicit philosophical theory. This is perhaps clearest in the writings of Fran-
cis Bacon (1561–1626), often regarded as the father of “the scientific method.”
Rebelling against the Aristotelian idea that natural philosophy (i.e., science)
can discover the essences of things, Bacon explicitly advocated an austere form
of “inductivism” in his influential Novum Organum (Bacon, 1620). According
to Bacon, scientists should proceed by first collecting data, for example, by
observing that this or that pot of water boils at 100◦ C. Having collected such
data, they should then generalize from observed correlations in that data, for
example, by concluding that water always boils at 100◦ C. In short, Bacon’s
official view identified scientific reasoning with extrapolation from data.
In practice, however, Bacon seems to have allowed for a different type of
reasoning to play an important role in science (McMullin, 1992, 175–179).

Bacon was an early advocate of what was later dubbed the kinetic theory of
heat, which holds that heat can be identified with the motion of unobservably
small parts of the heated body (i.e., what we would now call molecules). But
how could Bacon establish that these unobservably small parts move around
within the heated body in the first place, or indeed that they exist at all? Baco-
nian generalization from a correlation among observations cannot do the trick,
since there was never a correlation to generalize; there is no correlation between
observations of hot bodies and observations of bodies consisting of small parts
in motion, simply because those parts are hypothesized to be too small to see.
So, in his scientific practice, Bacon seems to have been relying on some addi-
tional form of reasoning in which we are given license to postulate the existence
of unobservable entities to explain observable phenomena, such as heat.
Something similar can be said of René Descartes (1596–1650). In contrast
to Bacon the empiricist, Descartes the rationalist held that scientific knowledge
(scientia) is grounded in the “simple natures” of objects, which we can come
to know through direct apprehension, or “intuition.” In his influential meth-

odological essay, Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1985/1628), Descartes
repeatedly warns against settling for “merely probable cognition,” instead urg-
ing us to “resolve to believe only what is perfectly known and incapable of
being doubted” (Descartes, 1985/1628, 10). This may seem to leave little room
for abductive reasoning – which, after all, uses empirical data rather than direct
apprehensions into simple natures, and delivers theories that are very much
capable of being doubted.
However, a closer look at Descartes’s own scientific writings, especially in
his later work Principles of Philosophy (1985/1644), paints a more nuanced
picture. Accompanying Descartes’s official rationalist theory of scientific rea-
soning, scholars have found an implicit scientific methodology that resembles
abductive reasoning in some important respects (Clarke, 1992; Dellsén, 2017b).
In more than 300 separate sections, Descartes posits various novel and ingen-
ious mechanisms to explain numerous natural phenomena, such as why bodies
fall toward the earth, how magnets work, and why glass is transparent. Des-
cartes prefaces the discussion by telling us that he wishes to “put forward
everything that I am about to write simply as a hypothesis,” adding in the French
edition that it “is perhaps far from the truth” (Descartes, 1985/1644, 255).
Clearly, then, Descartes felt the need to employ some other form of reason-
ing – in which hypotheses are fallibly posited to explain known phenomena –
in addition to his official rationalist and infallibilist methodology.
The methodological necessity of some form of abductive reasoning is also
apparent in the writings of various prominent scientists of the early modern
period (Thagard, 1978). For example, Antoine Lavoisier’s (1743–1794) work

on chemical phenomena such as combustion and calcination led him to posit the
existence of oxygen, because with it “all the phenomena were explained with an
astonishing simplicity” (Lavoisier, 1862, 623). Similarly, Charles Darwin ends
his famous discussion of a vast range of empirical facts about biological species
that support his theory of evolution by writing: “It can hardly be supposed that
a false theory could explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of
natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified” (Darwin,
1962, 476). Darwin explicitly defended his use of this “method of arguing” by
pointing out that “it is a method used in judgment of the common events of life,
and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers” (Darwin, 1962,
476).
In sum, then, it appears that something like abductive reasoning – in which
theories are posited to explain known phenomena – emerged during the advent
of modern science amongst scientific luminaries such as Bacon, Descartes,
Lavoisier, and Darwin. However, as noted above, this form of reasoning
appears to have been largely implicit amongst working scientists of this period,
rather than being based on an explicit account of how reasoning of this kind
ought to proceed.
1.2 Peirce’s Notion of “Abduction”

This began to change with the work of the American pragmatist Charles S.
Peirce (1839–1914), from whom the term “abduction” and its cognates seem
to originate. Peirce wrote a number of works touching on the topic over his long
career, often contrasting “Abduction” with both “Deduction” and “Induction.”
In one frequently quoted passage, Peirce (1958, 5.145) writes that Abduction
follows the following schema:
The surprising fact C is observed.

But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.
For example, one may notice the surprising fact that a burning object placed in
a vacuum immediately stops burning. If, as Lavoisier claimed, combustion is a
process in which a burning substance combines with oxygen, then this surpris-
ing fact would be a matter of course. Hence, according to Peirce’s Abduction
schema, there is reason to suspect that Lavoisier’s theory is true.
It is worth noting that Peirce was arguably not entirely consistent over
time about how he defined ‘Abduction’ – or, indeed, regarding which term
he used for it, preferring “Hypothesis” and “Retroduction” in his earlier work.
Moreover, most contemporary readers of Peirce agree that his use of the term
“Abduction” differs in important ways from how the term tends to be used and
understood today. In particular, several scholars (Hanson, 1958; Kapitan, 1992;
Minnameier, 2004; Campos, 2011) have argued that in his most influential
works, Peirce uses “Abduction” to refer to a psychological process of generat-
ing or suggesting new hypotheses. Put differently, the standard interpretation of
Peirce’s work is that his notion of Abduction primarily describes the process by
which we can or should come to think of novel theories, namely by considering
what type of theory would potentially explain the facts before us, regardless of
whether those theories can be considered true or plausible.
Apart from textual evidence supporting this interpretation, there are philo-
sophical reasons for taking Peircean Abduction to be something other than a
rule of inference – or, at most, to be a very weak rule of inference. After all, it
should be clear that the same set of facts may lead, via a Peircean Abduction, to
quite different, indeed incompatible, theories. Put in terms of the above schema,
for each C there will arguably be several incompatible theories A1, . . . , An such
that if each Ai were true, then C would be “a matter of course.” For exam-
ple, note that Lavoisier’s oxygen theory of combustion is not the only theory
on which we should expect an object to stop burning once placed in a vac-
uum. Consider instead the theory that burning involves the transfer of a specific
substance, phlogiston, from the object to the surrounding air. This theory also
explains why nothing burns in a vacuum, because in a vacuum there is no air to
receive the phlogiston that would otherwise be transferred from the object. So
which theory, Lavoisier’s oxygen-based theory or this phlogiston-based theory,
should be inferred? (We cannot infer both, since the two theories contradict
each other.) Peircean Abduction, by itself, does not answer these questions,
which in turn suggests that Peirce did not intend it to be a rule of inference
at all.
A note on terminology is appropriate at this point. As I have intimated, con-
temporary authors usually use the term “abduction” to refer to an epistemic
process of providing support for explanatory hypotheses (see, e.g., Douven,
2021). This is a process that is meant to make certain theories plausible or
believable, as opposed to merely helping us come up with those theories.
In order to prevent confusion between Peirce’s notion of Abduction and the
contemporary notion of abduction, I have chosen to use the term “abduc-
tive reasoning” when referring to the latter; and, on those occasions I refer to
the former, I will use “generation of explanatory hypotheses.” Keeping these
notions clearly distinct from one another is important for a number of reasons.
For example, some accounts of abductive reasoning (e.g., Lipton, 2004) take it
to involve, as one part of the process, the generation of explanatory hypotheses
(see §2.2).
1.3 The Hypothetico-Deductive Model

Peirce’s notion of Abduction is an important early precursor to contemporary
accounts of abductive reasoning. Another idea that is arguably just as impor-
tant a precursor to such accounts is the so-called hypothetico-deductive model
(the HD model; also known as the hypothetico-deductive method ), often asso-
ciated with William Whewell, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl G. Hempel, among
others.4
4 See, for example, Sankey (2008, 251) and Okasha and Thébault (2020, 774). With that said,
as far as I know, none of the authors mentioned above advocate the simple version of the HD
model described below. Of the three, Hempel is perhaps the one that comes closest to doing
so in his textbook The Philosophy of Natural Science (Hempel, 1966, 196–199). However,
a discussion in a textbook can hardly be assumed to accurately reflect Hempel‘s own con-
sidered views on the topic. Indeed, Hempel (1945) proposes a much more nuanced theory of
confirmation that conflicts in important ways with the HD model (on this, see Crupi, 2021,
§2.1).
The HD model can be thought of as a combination of two ideas. The first

idea is about the temporal priority of theory over data. The HD model says, in
direct opposition to the inductivism of Francis Bacon, that one should formu-
late one’s theory before one starts gathering data (e.g., by making observations
and doing experiments). In other words, one should start by “hypothesizing.”
At this point, the theory is merely a guess, a hypothesis; it is not something
the theorist must take to be true, probably true, or even particularly plausi-
ble. According to Hempel (1966, 201–207) there are no rules of rationality for
how one should go about coming up with such hypotheses – one may sim-
ply let one’s imagination roam free in search of some guess that might work.
Indeed, it would be impossible to formulate such rules, according to Hempel,
because oftentimes the correct guess will be completely different from one’s
earlier way of approaching the issue, and also very different from the empirical
data one has gathered so far. In particular, the guess might well postulate the
existence of some new type of entity that cannot be directly observed at all,
such as subatomic particles or electromagnetic fields.
The other part of the HD model concerns how this guess – this hypothesis –
is evaluated. According to the HD model, the hypothesis is evaluated by testing
its empirical consequences. An empirical consequence of a hypothesis is some-
thing that can be deduced from it, given background assumptions, and that can
be directly verified in some way, such as by an observation or experiment. If
these empirical consequences are shown to be correct, the theory from which
they have been deduced is confirmed or supported according to the HD model.
So the logical structure of scientific confirmation, according to the HD model,
is as follows:
The HD model (scientific confirmation): A theory T is confirmed (to some

extent), given some background assumptions A, just in case:
(i) T, together with A, deductively implies an empirical consequence E; and
(ii) E is indeed correct, as shown by empirical data.
We are now in a position to see why the HD model has the word “deductive”
in it. It’s because, in order for the theory to be supported by the observations or
experimental results, the empirical consequences which serve as evidence for
the theory must be deducible from the theory. However, note that what is being
deduced is not the theory itself; rather, it is the empirical consequences of the
theory. And yet it is the theory that is being supported or confirmed, not (just)
its empirical consequences.
There is a caveat to the HD model as presented above that will prove to
be important as we contrast it below with prominent accounts of abductive
reasoning. It’s that on this presentation of the HD model, it is not a model of how
to end up with a theory that we can infer or accept, all things considered. Rather,
the HD model may only describe what it is for a theory T to gain some degree of
confirmation from a set of empirical data, which may only consist in making T
somewhat more credible than it would otherwise have been. After all, verifying
a single empirical consequence of some theory surely does not by itself show
that the theory is true, or even probably true. Some authors suggest that this
issue can be addressed by slightly modifying the HD model by requiring a
greater number of T’s empirical consequences to be verified, at which point T
may be inferred to be true:
The HD model (scientific inference): A theory T may be inferred to be true,

given some background assumptions A, just in case:
(i) T, together with A, deductively implies some empirical consequences
E1, . . . , Em ; and
(ii) E1, . . . , Em are indeed correct, as shown by empirical data.
Now, there are clearly some important similarities between the Peirce’s
notion of Abduction, on the one hand, and the HD model of scientific confirma-
tion and inference, on the other. In particular, the structures of the two types of
accounts are remarkably similar: both require a kind of derivation of a manifest
fact from a hypothetical guess. The most important difference concerns the fact
that, as we have noted, Peirce appears to be concerned with the process of gen-
erating theories rather than with how theories should be evaluated. By contrast,
Hempel explicitly leaves this out of his HD model, on the grounds that there can
be no rational rules for generating new theories. In this respect, Hempel’s HD
model and Peircean Abduction are diametrically opposed ideas. This makes it
especially interesting, and frankly somewhat puzzling, that the structures of the
accounts are so similar, since one would not expect accounts of two quite dif-
ferent aspects of scientific methodology to end up being structurally so similar
to one another.
Indeed, the similarity in structure between Peircean Abduction and the HD
model points to a well-known problem for the latter that will be familiar from
our earlier discussion of the former. Recall that in a Peircean Abduction, for
each “surprising fact” C there will arguably be several incompatible proposi-
tions A1, . . . , An such that if each Ai were true, then C would be “a matter of
course.” A similar point applies to the HD model as applied to scientific confir-
mation: For each empirical consequence E, there will inevitably be several
theories T1, . . . , Tn from which E may be deduced. This point may be illus-
trated by returning to the example of Lavoisier’s oxygen theory of combustion,
which arguably implies the empirical fact that nothing burns in a vacuum. The
problem is that the competing phlogiston theory, at least as formulated above,
implies the very same empirical fact. Thus, the HD model must say that both
theories are confirmed; moreover, the model has no resources to say that one of
the two theories is confirmed to a greater extent than the other. The same goes
for any other theory from which this empirical fact can be deduced, however
implausible it might seem in other respects.
One might think that this is less of a problem for the HD model as applied
to scientific inference, given that it involves deducing not a single empirical
consequence E but a set of such consequences E1, . . . , Em , all of which have
been shown to be correct by empirical data. After all, the thought might go,
although it would be easy to come up with a theory that entails a single E,
it need not be so easy to come up with a theory that entails all of E1, . . . , Em
(provided that m is a sufficiently large number). Unfortunately, however, given
a single theory T that implies E1, . . . , Em , it is quite easy to use elementary logic
to come up with another theory that does so as well. For example, it’s a logical
fact that if T implies E1, . . . , Em , then so does the conjunction T&X, where X
can be any claim whatsoever. Indeed, any set of empirical claims E1, . . . , Em
is trivially implied by the conjunction of those claims and any other claim X,
that is, by E1 & . . . &Em &X. Here, X could be a claim that contradicts T, such
as the negation of T, ¬T. This leaves us with the absurd conclusion that the
HD model allows one to infer T and a claim that directly contradicts T, namely
E1 & . . . &Em &¬T.
Something has clearly gone quite wrong in the HD model. The solution might
seem obvious. For surely the issue here is that the alternative “theories” that
imply our empirical data E1, . . . , Em are highly artificial, or just plain implau-
sible – so much so that no actual scientists would propose such theories with
a straight face. This is correct, but it’s not so much a solution to the problem
as it is the beginnings of a diagnosis of it. In order to solve the problem, we
need an account of scientific reasoning in which artificial or implausible “the-
ories” are not so easily confirmable or inferable by empirical data. If possible,
the account should also be able to explain why this is the case. Unfortunately
for the HD model, it fails to do either of these things. As we shall see below,
however, some accounts of abductive reasoning do significantly better on this
score. Hence abductive reasoning, or at least some accounts thereof, can be
viewed as improvements on the HD model in this respect.
Before we move on, it is worth noting another problem for the HD model of
scientific confirmation and inference. This problem concerns the “deductive”
part of the HD model, that is, the requirement that it must be possible to deduce
correct empirical claims from the theory that is being confirmed or inferred. In
short, the problem is that many scientific theories, especially those that concern
causal relationships between two or more variables, do not categorically state
that a given event will definitively occur under specified circumstances; rather,
these theories often only state that the event has a particular chance of occurring
in those circumstances. Indeed, sometimes the probability of this chance event
is extremely low. Consider, for example, the geological theories that are used
to predict when and where earthquakes will occur, which might assign a 0.1%
probability to an earthquake occurring during a given week in a very high-
risk area. In these cases, there is no deductive relationship between theory and
empirical data, because for each piece of data (e.g., for each earthquake that
is observed to occur), it is perfectly possible – perhaps even probable – that
one would have obtained contrary data (e.g., an observation that no earthquake
occurred) even if the relevant theory is true.
Probabilistic theories of this sort are problematic for the HD model because
although we cannot deduce any empirical consequences from the theories, it
nevertheless seems clear that empirical results can confirm them. For example,
suppose that a newly proposed geological theory implies that the probability of
an earthquake in your city sometime next week is as high as 10%, whereas all
other available theories assign a less than 0.00001% probability to this event.
If the earthquake subsequently occurs, then surely the new theory can be con-
sidered confirmed to some extent, at least relative to its rivals. And if a similar
story were to repeat itself in other geographical areas and at other times, with
the new theory assigning a much higher probability to earthquakes that actually
occur, then at some point we may feel that the theory ought to be believed or
accepted as true. Unfortunately for the HD model, it cannot deliver these ver-
dicts, for none of the theories involved implies that the earthquake will occur,
only that it has some probability of occurring.
In sum, then, we have seen that the HD model faces at least two serious prob-
lems. The first concerns how to discriminate between the “serious” theories that
are confirmed by their empirical consequences and various “unserious” theo-
ries that are not, such as conjunctions of the empirical consequences themselves
and random other claims. The second concerns inherently probabilistic theo-
ries – theories from which empirical consequences cannot be deduced but are
rather assigned a particular probability. I have focused on these problems here
because, as we shall see, even early accounts of abductive reasoning arguably
have the resources to address both of these problems. Moreover, these accounts
of abductive reasoning often preserve some of the structure of the HD model,
and thus are plausibly in a position to account for the kernel of truth in the
HD model – which, after all, has seemed to many to provide a fairly accurate
description of scientists’ actual methodology.5
1.4 Inference to the Best Explanation

In 1965, Gilbert Harman published a short paper which has had an enor-
mous influence on philosophical thinking about abductive reasoning ever since.
The paper was entitled “The Inference to the Best Explanation.” This term,
standardly abbreviated to “IBE,” is now often used for any type or account
of abductive reasoning.6 Harman acknowledged that his notion of IBE “cor-
responds approximately” to earlier ideas about scientific reasoning, such as
“abduction” and “the method of hypothesis,” but used his own terminology to
“avoid most of the misleading suggestions of alternative terminologies” (Har-
man, 1965, 88–89). Harman thus goes on to briefly describe his own notion of
IBE in a passage that is worth quoting in full:
In making this inference one infers, from the fact that a certain hypothesis
would explain the evidence, to the truth of that hypothesis. In general, there
will be several hypotheses which might explain the evidence, so one must be
able to reject all such alternative hypotheses before one is warranted in mak-
ing the inference. Thus one infers, from the premise that a given hypothesis
would provide a “better” explanation for the evidence than would any other
hypothesis, to the conclusion that the given hypothesis is true.
There is, of course, a problem about how one is to judge that one hypothe-
sis is sufficiently better than another hypothesis. Presumably such a judgment
will be based on considerations such as which hypothesis is simpler, which

is more plausible, which explains more, which is less ad hoc, and so forth. I
do not wish to deny that there is a problem about explaining the exact nature
of these considerations; I will not, however, say anything more about this
problem (Harman, 1965, 89).
Much of this description should remind us of the ideas about scientific rea-
soning we have encountered earlier in this section. In particular, we have seen
that Darwin, Lavoisier, and Peirce all emphasized the significance of “the fact
that a certain hypothesis would explain the evidence” for “the truth of that
5 For example, Lipton (2004, 15) writes that “the hypothetico-deductive model seems genuinely
to reflect scientific practice, which is perhaps why it has become the scientists’ philosophy of
science.”
6 As we shall see in the next section, however, only some contemporary accounts of abductive
reasoning can be said to be developments of Harman’s account; other contemporary accounts
depart so significantly from Harman’s ideas that they are more fruitfully viewed as competing
accounts.
hypothesis.” Furthermore, Harman’s list of considerations for judging whether

one hypothesis is “sufficiently better” than another seem to fit with Lavoisier’s
and Darwin’s remarks, such as those about explaining “several large classes of
facts” (Darwin) and doing so “with an astonishing simplicity” (Lavoisier). In
Section 3, we will return to these considerations and ask whether Harman (and
Lavoisier, Darwin, etc.) was right to think that they make a theory “better” –
and, if so, in what sense of that term.
For now, it is worth drawing out some of the more important ways in which
Harman’s description of IBE differs from most previous ideas about abduc-
tive reasoning. First, Harman’s IBE is explicitly comparative. Despite what
Harman seems to be saying at the beginning of the passage, one cannot really
infer from the fact that a theory explains the evidence that the theory is true.
This is because, as Harman goes on to note, “[i]n general, there will be sev-
eral hypotheses which might explain the evidence” – and these plainly cannot
all be true at the same time. Hence, we get from Harman the more careful
statement of IBE as inferring “from the premise that a given hypothesis would
provide a “better” explanation for the evidence than would any other hypoth-
esis, to the conclusion that the given hypothesis is true” (Harman, 1965, 89).
Inference to the Best Explanation is inference to the best explanatory hypoth-
esis, where “bestness” is a comparative matter of being better than alternative
hypotheses.
This comparative aspect of IBE is arguably an improvement over previ-
ous and related ideas, such as Peirce’s Abduction and the HD model. To see
this, consider the first objection to the HD model from the previous subsection
(§1.3), according to which the model automatically counts various artificial

theories, such as the conjunction E1 & . . . &Em &X, for any X, as confirmed
by, and inferable from, the evidence E1, . . . , Em which follows (trivially) from
it. Harman’s IBE, by contrast, does not automatically count such theories as
inferable because they might not be – and usually are not – able to provide
as good explanations as several alternative theories with which they could be
compared. In particular, on an intuitive level at least, such theories will usually
be both less simple, and more ad hoc, than several other theories – less sim-
ple because they will consist of a gerrymandered conjunction of claims; and
more ad hoc because this conjunction will have been deliberately constructed
to contain as conjuncts all the empirical consequences E1, . . . , Em .7
7 Indeed, in this particular case, it is not clear that a theory like E1 & . . . &Em &X would provide
any explanation – let alone the best explanation – of E1 , . . . , Em . After all, E1 & . . . &Em &X
is a conjunction of E1 & . . . &Em , which cannot explain itself, and X, which may be completely
irrelevant to E1 & . . . &Em .
Consider also the second objection to the HD model, which concerned

inherently probabilistic theories from which empirical consequences cannot
be deduced even though the theories assign to them a particular probability.
Although Harman himself does not discuss what notion of “explanation” he
had in mind, it seems plausible that a theory could explain the occurrence of an
event without the event being deducible from the theory. In particular, assign-
ing a reasonably high probability to an event seems to explain that event, at
least to some extent and in some cases. Generalizing this point, one might fur-
ther think that if one theory assigns a higher probability to an event than another
theory, then the first theory explains the event more strongly, and thus “better”
in one sense of the term, at least all else being equal (Strevens, 2000). And
it’s natural to think, and certainly in the spirit of Harman’s remarks above, that
explaining “more strongly,” or “better,” contributes to making the explanation
better overall and thus inferable by a Harman-style IBE.
If so, then it seems that Harman’s IBE can account for cases in which inher-
ently probabilistic theories are confirmed by events to which they only assign
a probability, and perhaps even a very low probability, provided that the alter-
native theories assign an even lower probability to those events. To illustrate,
consider again the example of a new geological theory on which the occurrence
of an earthquake in your city next week is assigned a 0.1% probability while
alternative theories all assign a less than 0.00001% probability to this event. If
the earthquake subsequently occurs, then the envisioned version of Harman’s
IBE would count the first theory as providing a much stronger explanation of
the earthquake than any of the alternative theories on offer, which in turn would
favor inferring the new theory over the alternatives, all else being equal. If a
similar story were to repeat itself in other geographical areas and at other times,
with the new theory assigning a much higher probability to earthquakes that
actually occur, then at some point this might tip the balance in favor of the
new geological theory providing the overall best explanation, and thus being
inferable by IBE.
In sum, then, Harman’s IBE arguably improves on the HD model in both
of the two respects in which the HD model falls short. At the same time, Har-
man’s description of this type of inference seems to capture the core insight
of the HD model, namely, that much of scientific reasoning involves coming
up with educated guesses, in the form of hypotheses or theories, which are
then subsequently tested against empirical data. Harman’s notion of IBE adds
to this (i) that the connection between the theories and the data is explanatory
rather than deductive, that is, such that the theory explains rather than entails the
data; and (ii) that the theories that are inferred or confirmed must provide better
explanations than other available theories that would also explain the data.
2 Contemporary Accounts of Abductive Reasoning

This section provides an opinionated overview of contemporary accounts of
abductive reasoning. We’ll start off by distinguishing three types of such
accounts: inferential, probabilistic, and hybrid accounts (§2.1). Inferential
accounts construe abductive reasoning as a specific type of inference, in which
an explanatory hypothesis is eventually accepted or believed (§2.2). Prob-
abilistic accounts, by contrast, construe abductive reasoning as a form of
probabilistic updating that is influenced by explanatory considerations in some
way (§2.3). Finally, hybrid accounts construe abduction as a combination of
both, in that a distinctively explanatory type of inference serves as a heuristic
for approximating some form of probabilistic updating (§2.4).
2.1 A Classification of Accounts

In the previous section, we surveyed part of the history of abductive reasoning
and related ideas about scientific reasoning, ending with Harman’s notion of
Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). In this section, we pick up the thread
in a more recent setting, examining contemporary accounts of abductive rea-
soning. Some of these accounts owe much to Harman’s ideas; others are greatly
influenced by earlier thinkers, such as Peirce; and yet others are influenced by
the desire to avoid problems with earlier accounts of scientific reasoning, such
as the HD model. Thus, we will refer back to the previous section at various
points below. From here onwards, however, the discussion will be themati-
cally rather than chronologically organized. To facilitate this discussion, we
may classify the different accounts of abductive reasoning that can be found in
the contemporary literature into three distinct types:
A first type of accounts may be called inferential accounts. These accounts
hold that abductive reasoning involves inferring hypotheses on the basis of
explanatory considerations, where an inference is a type of reasoning in which
one draws a categorical conclusion of some type from a set of premises. In
particular, these accounts construe abductive reasoning as a type of amplia-
tive inference, in which the content of the conclusion goes beyond the content
of the premises, and where the premises are constituted by one’s evidence at
the relevant time. In a typical inferential account of abductive reasoning, it
involves comparing a number of competing explanatory hypotheses in terms
of how good an explanation each would provide us with, and then accepting the
hypothesis that would provide the best one. As we shall see, inferential accounts
are attractive in part because they seem well suited to explaining the actual
scientific practice of comparatively evaluating and accepting explanatory
hypotheses. Inferential accounts are discussed in Section 2.2.
A second type of accounts may be called probabilistic accounts. These

accounts hold that abductive reasoning involves assigning probabilities to
explanatory hypotheses and updating these probabilities as more evidence is
obtained. Thus if one hypothesis explains some piece of incoming data partic-
ularly well, whereas another explains the data poorly or not at all, probabilistic
accounts say that you should increase the probability assigned to the former at
the expense of the probability assigned to the latter. Most probabilistic accounts
are amendments or modifications of the Bayesian approach to scientific rea-
soning, so these accounts take on some of the burdens, but also the benefits, of
the Bayesian approach. Probabilistic accounts can deliver impressively precise
analyses of how scientists ought to reason under ideal conditions, but they are
arguably much less plausible than inferential accounts as descriptions of actual
scientific practice. Probabilistic accounts are discussed in Section 2.3.
The third and final type of accounts may be called hybrid accounts. These
accounts combine elements from each of the other two types of accounts, that
is, inferential and probabilistic accounts. While there are important differences
between the various hybrid accounts that have been proposed, such accounts
generally hold that abductive reasoning involves both a process of generating,
comparing, and accepting hypotheses, and also an assignment of probabilities
to these hypotheses. In particular, one sort of hybrid account holds that compar-
ing and accepting hypotheses serves as a means to approximate correct prob-
abilistic updating for imperfectly rational agents, such as ordinary humans. If
hybrid accounts can be made to work, then they would arguably bring the “best
of both worlds” from the other types of accounts, in that they may capture the
descriptive accuracy of inferential accounts and the powerful normative frame-

work of probabilistic accounts. Hybrid accounts are discussed in Section 2.4.
As this preliminary overview perhaps indicates, I am myself partial to hybrid
accounts. Accordingly, when evaluating the three types of accounts over the
course of the current section, I will be gently nudging the reader towards hybrid
accounts. However, since hybrid accounts combine elements from both of the
other types of accounts, this does not necessarily involve arguing against infer-
ential and probabilistic accounts except in so far as they purport to be the
complete story of abductive reasoning. I will, however, present some reasons
for preferring some particular accounts of each type as components of a hybrid
account of the sort I prefer.
2.2 Inferential Accounts

Recall that what I am calling inferential accounts hold that abductive reasoning
consists in inferring hypotheses on the basis of explanatory considerations. As
noted above, this formulation assumes a quite specific notion of “inference,” in
which it involves drawing a categorical conclusion of some type from a set of

premises. Put more precisely, inference is the mental act of forming a positive
epistemic attitude of a non-gradable sort towards some proposition (the conclu-
sion), for example, by accepting, believing, or judging it to be true, because one
takes some other propositions (the premises) to provide support for it.8 So, for
example, if one previously suspended judgment on some theory, and thus had
no belief either way regarding it, but then one comes to believe that the theory
is true as a result of gathering and considering some evidence, then one counts
as having inferred the theory from the evidence on this notion of inference. If
the inference is moreover based at least partly on explanatory considerations in
some way, then it is an instance of abductive reasoning according to inferential
accounts thereof.
Many, perhaps most, accounts of abductive reasoning are inferential in this
sense.9 In particular, many of those who follow Harman in thinking of abduc-
tive reasoning as IBE seem to be advocating for an inferential account of some
sort. For instance, we see proponents of IBE describe it as “accepting a hypoth-
esis on the grounds that it provides a better explanation of the evidence than
is provided by alternative hypotheses” (Thagard, 1978, 77), or as “the proce-
dure of choosing the hypothesis or theory that best explains the available data”
(Vogel, 2005, 445–446). Indeed, the connection between describing abductive
reasoning as IBE, on the one hand, and adhering to some sort of inferential
account is natural since Harman himself seems to have been proposing an infer-
ential account when he introduced the term. For Harman, IBE involves ending
up with “the conclusion that the given hypothesis is true” (Harman, 1965, 89).10
Taking abductive reasoning to be a form of inference still leaves a lot of room

for debate about how exactly to best characterize such reasoning in various
other respects. To see this, let us consider what is doubtless the most influential
account of abductive reasoning since Harman (1965), namely the inferential
account presented in Peter Lipton’s book Inference to the Best Explanation
(Lipton, 1991).11 A notable feature of Lipton’s account is that he conceives
of IBE as a two-stage process, where one first generates a limited set of
8 This definition of inference is in line with influential accounts of inference provided by Frege
(1979), Boghossian (2014), and Neta (2013).
9 In addition to those mentioned below, these include the accounts of Foster (1982), Musgrave
(1988), Lycan (1988, 2012), and Weintraub (2013).
10 See also Harman 1989, ch. 3, and Harman 1997.
11 In chapter 7 of the second edition of his book, Lipton (2004, 103–120) suggests that IBE can
be seen as a heuristic for Bayesian reasoning, which brings his account closer to what I am
calling hybrid accounts (discussed in §2.4). In what follows I nevertheless refer to the second
edition when discussing Lipton’s original inferentialist account, since the relevant discussion
is largely unchanged between the first and second editions.
competing explanatory hypotheses (the generation stage), and one then infers
the best hypothesis that has been generated in this way (the inference stage). At
both stages, explanatory considerations come into play, helping us first to come
up with plausible competing explanations at the generation stage, and then to
accept one of these competing explanations at the inference stage.
One way to think about this aspect of Lipton’s account is in terms of com-
parisons with Peirce’s notion of Abduction and Harman’s IBE. As we have
noted, Peirce’s Abduction was arguably focused on the generation of theo-
ries, so Lipton’s first stage of IBE may be roughly identified with Peirce’s
Abduction. By contrast, Harman was silent on how “alternative hypotheses” are
generated; indeed, Harman did not explicitly acknowledge that there was any
epistemic issue to be addressed regarding how such hypotheses would be gen-
erated. Instead, Harman’s discussion of IBE is exclusively concerned with the
process of inferring some hypothesis, by comparing it in terms of explanatory
considerations with other hypotheses, regardless of how these other hypothe-
ses came into consideration. To be fair, it should not be surprising that Harman,
writing in 1965, would have overlooked the issue of how explanatory hypothe-
ses are generated, since philosophers of science did not at that time generally
consider such topics to be within the purview of their field (Schickore, 2022,
§5).
Another distinctive feature of Lipton’s account concerns what makes an
explanatory hypothesis “best,” or “better” than an alternative. On Lipton’s
account, “the best explanation [is] the one which would, if correct, be the
most explanatory or provide the most understanding: the ‘loveliest’ explana-
tion” (2004, 59). Lipton (2004, 61) goes on to describe his version of IBE as
“Inference to the Loveliest Explanation,” where “loveliness” is determined by
how much understanding an explanatory hypothesis would provide if it were
true. Elliott (2021) points out that in this respect Lipton’s account departs from
the more standard idea that explanatory goodness is determined by a list of
explanatory virtues (how simple it is, how much it explains, etc.), as Harman
suggests and many other proponents of IBE have maintained. In Section 3, we
will examine which of these two conceptions of explanatory goodness is more
plausible or congenial to accounts of abductive reasoning.
An important issue on which different inferential accounts diverge is how to
conceive of the structure of the evaluation that takes place within abductive rea-
soning. As the term “Inference to the Best Explanation” indicates, the standard
view – once again inherited from Harman (1965) – is that this is a comparative
evaluation of one explanatory hypothesis as better than the set of alterna-
tive hypotheses that have been generated. Thus, on the standard conception
of explanatory goodness as determined by explanatory virtues, one compares
the extent to which one hypothesis exhibits various explanatory virtues to

the extent to which alternative hypotheses exhibit these virtues. By contrast,
there is nothing in Harman’s formulation to suggest that abductive reasoning
involves evaluating, in an absolute sense, whether a given hypothesis is simple
tout court, or whether it has some specific degree of simplicity; and likewise
for other explanatory virtues.12
This gives rise to a classic objection to IBE, pressed most influentially by Bas
van Fraassen (1989).13 Van Fraassen pointed out that, in the type of compara-
tive evaluation that is involved in IBE, a given theory can only be reasonably
judged to be better than other theories that have actually been generated, not
also to be better than other theories that no one has (yet) proposed. So the “best”
of these theories might very well be “the best of a bad lot” (van Fraassen, 1989,
143). The problem here is not that IBE cannot deliver a reasonable comparative
evaluation of which theory, in some set of alternatives, is the most plausible or
inferable. Rather, van Fraassen is pointing out that since the hypotheses one
has so far generated may all be false, the true explanation might be provided
by a hypothesis outside of the set of available hypotheses. In that case, IBE
would lead us to a false conclusion, no matter how good we are at locating the
best explanatory hypothesis among the available competitors. This is known
as the bad lot objection and it has shaped much of the debate about IBE in the
last few decades. It will be discussed at length in Section 4, along with other
similar objections to IBE.
For the time being, suffice it to say that the bad lot objection has been influen-
tial in shaping contemporary accounts of abductive reasoning. In particular, the
objection has motivated a number of authors – including van Fraassen him-

self – to formulate non-inferential accounts of abductive reasoning: “Despite
its name, [Inference to the Best Explanation] is not the rule to infer the truth
of the best available explanation. That is only a code for the real rule, which
is to allocate our personal probabilities with due respect to explanation” (van
Fraassen, 1989, 143). What van Fraassen is suggesting here is that abductive
reasoning cannot be plausibly analyzed as a form of inference at all; instead,
it may be more promising to subsume abductive reasoning under a framework
for scientific reasoning in which we merely assign “personal probabilities” to
theories.14 Van Fraassen ultimately concludes that this is a dead-end as well,
12 Indeed, it is not clear how to even make sense of absolute evaluations of explanatory virtues,
since there doesn’t seem to be a universal measure of such virtues that would apply to all or
even most theories (Dellsén, 2021, 162–163).
13 See also Sklar (1981), Stanford (2006), and Roush (2005), among others, for closely related
concerns about scientific reasoning based on the fact that scientists typically have only
generated a fraction of all possible theories in some domain.
14 Despite describing “Inference to the Best Explanation” as “only code for the real rule,” van
Fraassen goes on to refer to the “real rule” as “Inference to the Best Explanation” as well (see
and so that we should do away with abductive reasoning entirely. However, as

we shall now see, others have been inspired by van Fraassen’s suggestion to
develop various probability-based accounts of abductive reasoning.
2.3 Probabilistic Accounts

The hallmark of probabilistic accounts of abductive reasoning, as I shall be
using the term, is that they attempt to capture abductive reasoning entirely
within the Bayesian approach to scientific reasoning – henceforth simply
Bayesianism. For our purposes, Bayesianism can be said to consist of the
following three claims. First, scientists (and other agents) have, or can be rep-
resented as having, extremely fine-grained opinions about various states of the
world. In particular, according to Bayesianism, scientists will not merely have
an opinion that some hypothesis H is true or plausible; rather they will assign –
or will be representable as assigning – a specific real value between 0 and 1 to
H, where an assignment of 0 amounts to being certain that H is false while an
assignment of 1 amounts to being certain that H is true. These fine-grained opin-
ions are often referred to as credences (alternatively: degrees of belief, degrees
of confidence), partly in order to distinguish them from more coarse-grained
opinions such as (outright) acceptance and (full) belief.
Second, Bayesianism claims that in order for the agents in question to be
perfectly rational, their credences must satisfy the axioms of the probability
calculus. Put differently, credences must be probabilities, in the mathemati-
cal sense of the term which is defined by the probability axioms. This means,
among other things, that these (rational) agents’ opinions can be represented as
a probability function, Pr(·), from any proposition to a real value between 0 and
1 (inclusive). This is the sense in which, as authors such as van Fraassen put
it, a rational agent has “personal probabilities”: They have credences which,
if perfectly rational according to Bayesianism, count as probabilities by the
mathematical definition thereof. In later years, it has become common to refer
to this part of the Bayesian approach as Probabilism, since it demands of
rational agents that their opinions be probabilities.15
also, e.g., Weisberg, 2009; Henderson, 2014; Pettigrew, 2021). By contrast, I use “Inference to
the Best Explanation” to refer more narrowly to the inferential account of abductive reasoning
developed by Harman and Lipton, among others.
15 Note that Probabilism is a normative requirement. It says something about what combina-
tions of credences agents ought to have in order to be epistemically rational, rather than what
combinations of opinions they actually have. For example, if A entails B but not vice versa,
Probabilism implies that rational agents must assign a lower credence to A than to B, since it
follows from the probability axioms that the probability of A is lower than that of B.
A third and final claim made by Bayesianism concerns how perfectly rational
agents should change their credences (i.e., their personal probabilities) over
time, as they gain more information about the world. Put differently, it con-
cerns how they should “update” these personal probabilities in light of new
evidence. The canonical version of this claim has become known as Bayesian
Conditionalization. It says that rational agents should update the value of their
personal probability regarding some hypothesis H as they obtain some evidence
E (and no other evidence) by replacing it with the value of the probability they
previously assigned to H conditional on E, that is, the so-called conditional
probability of H given E, Pr(H|E). A bit more precisely:
Bayesian Conditionalization: A rational agent who obtains evidence E (and

no other evidence) should set
Pr′(H ) = Pr(H|E)
where Pr(·) and Pr′(·) are the agent’s probability functions before and after
obtaining E, respectively.16
Although there are other, arguably somewhat more sophisticated, versions of

this Bayesian updating rule, these will – with one exception discussed immedi-
ately below – generally not be important for our purposes here, for they refine
Bayesian Conditionalization in ways that do not concern abductive reasoning
specifically.
Now, although the above three claims form the core of Bayesianism, the
statement that is most often associated with the Bayesian approach – and from
which it gets its name – is simply a mathematical theorem of the probability

axioms that has proved to be extremely useful within the Bayesian approach,
namely Bayes’s Theorem:
Pr(E|H) Pr(H)
Pr(H|E) =
Pr(E)
One of the reasons this simple theorem is so useful for Bayesians is that it
allows them to calculate the value that one should assign to Pr′(H) accord-
ing to Bayesian Conditionalization: Pr′(H) = Pr(H|E) = Pr(E|H) Pr(H)
Pr(E) . Thus
Bayesians can say something quite informative about how an agent, such as
a scientist, should allocate their personal probabilities in a given case: They
should take their previous probabilities, Pr(E|H), Pr(H), Pr(E), combine these
as Bayes’s theorem dictates by multiplying the first two and dividing by the
third, and use the resulting value as their new personal probability for H.
16 Pr(·) and Pr′ (·) are also referred to as the agent’s prior and posterior probabilities, respectively.
With all this Bayesian machinery in our arsenal, we are now finally in a posi-
tion to consider probabilistic accounts of abductive reasoning. Let us start with
the approach suggested by van Fraassen (1989) following his critique of infer-
ential accounts (see §2.2 and §4.2). (In what follows, it is worth keeping in mind
that van Fraassen did not endorse the following proposal; indeed, he argued
that it was irredeemably flawed, along with other attempts to spell out cogent
accounts of abductive reasoning.) Van Fraassen’s core idea was that in order for
abductive reasoning to have a place within Bayesianism, the hypothesis that
best explains some evidence E must somehow be awarded greater personal
probability than Bayesian Conditionalization alone dictates. Thus, Bayesian
Conditionalization must effectively be modified so that a “bonus” is added to
the agent’s posterior probability for a hypothesis that provides the best expla-
nation of the relevant evidence. The simplest way to do this would be to require
that agents set Pr′(H) = Pr(H|E) + b, where b is the probability bonus awarded
to H for providing the best explanation of E. We might call this general idea
Abductive Conditionalization.17
Is Abductive Conditionalization plausible? Van Fraassen argues that it is not.
In short, van Fraassen’s argument is that since Abductive Conditionalization
requires agents to update their personal probabilities in a way that conflicts
with Bayesian Conditionalization, any argument for Bayesian Conditionaliza-
tion is an argument against Abductive Conditionalization. We will consider this
argument in much more detail in Section 4. For now, suffice it to say that most
authors – with the notable exception of Igor Douven (2013, 2022) – have agreed
with van Fraassen that Abductive Conditionalization is untenable. However,
few of them have concluded from this that there is no place for abductive rea-
soning within the Bayesian approach. Instead, they have generally rejected van
Fraassen’s construal of abductive reasoning in terms of bonus probabilities, and
argued that the Bayesian approach can be combined with a form of abductive
reasoning in a way that allows one to hold on to Bayesian Conditionalization.
In this section, I will consider two specific accounts of this kind, which hold
that explanatory preferences constrain Bayesian reasoning, on the one hand,
or emerge from it naturally, on the other hand. (In the next section, we turn to
accounts on which abductive reasoning functions as a heuristic for Bayesian
reasoning, and thus allow one to hold on to Bayesian Conditionalization in a
different way.)
17 If H is awarded a bonus in this way, then at least some competing hypotheses must receive
a penalty so as to balance the total probability awarded to H and its mutually exclusive and
jointly exhaustive rivals, because the sum of these probabilities has to be 1. In principle this
can be done in any number of ways, but – as we shall see below (§4.2) – Douven (2022, 51)
provides a nicely conservative and mathematically satisfying way of doing this.
Perhaps the most straightforward way of finding a place for abductive

reasoning within the Bayesian approach is to suggest that explanatory consid-
erations, such as the simplicity or explanatory power of a given hypothesis
relative to the evidence, determine how one should assign probabilities before
one updates on the evidence (e.g., Huemer, 2009; Weisberg, 2009; Poston,
2014; Bird, 2017). In particular, explanatory considerations may be taken
to constrain assignments of prior probabilities conditional on some evidence
before one obtains that evidence. Thus, if H2 is explanatorily better than H1
with respect to E, this view implies that one should assign a higher value
to Pr(H2 |E) than to Pr(H1 |E). By good old Bayesian Conditionalization, this
implies that the probability one ends up assigning to H2 , that is, the posterior
probability Pr′(H2 ), is also higher than the probability one ends up assign-
ing to H1 , Pr′(H1 ). Let us call accounts of this kind constraining probabilistic
accounts of abductive reasoning.
It may be worth delving a little deeper into how assigning a higher prior
conditional probability to the better explaining H2 than to the worse explaining
H1 would play out. Someone who starts out assigning a higher probability to H2
given E than to H1 given E, Pr(H1 |E) < Pr(H2 |E), must by Bayes’s Theorem
also assign probabilities that satisfy the following inequality:18
Pr(E|H1 ) Pr(H1 ) < Pr(E|H2 ) Pr(H2 )
In light of this, constraining probabilists might argue that we can identify sepa-
rate constraints for the first and second terms on each side, that is, the so-called
“likelihoods” Pr(E|H1 ) and Pr(E|H2 ), on the one hand, and the so-called “pri-
ors” Pr(H1 ) and Pr(H2 ), on the other. For example, purely theoretical virtues
like simplicity might be taken to constrain the priors, Pr(H1 ) and Pr(H2 );
while other virtues that are more concerned with the relationship between the
hypotheses and the evidence, such as explanatory power, might be taken to
constrain the likelihoods Pr(E|H1 ) and Pr(E|H2 ).
Clearly, requiring that one already assigns higher prior probabilities to more
explanatory hypotheses in this way ensures that there is no conflict between
constraining probabilistic accounts and Bayesian Conditionalization. On the
contrary, this approach supplements Bayesianism by providing criteria for
which prior probabilities agents should start out with. Moreover, constrain-
ing probabilistic accounts are quite flexible, in that they can accommodate any
judgment one might like to make regarding whether hypotheses exhibiting any
particular explanatory virtue to some extent should be preferred to hypotheses
18 This follows by applying Bayes’s Theorem to both sides of the inequality and cancelling out
Pr(E), which otherwise occurs in the denominator on both sides.
that don’t (or do so to a lesser extent). After all, such preferences can simply
be formulated as additional constraints on the prior probabilities one should
have before updating via Bayesian Conditionalization. Indeed, the preferences
in question need not be explanatory in any meaningful sense, since they could
literally concern any feature of the hypotheses in question whatsoever.
However, this flexibility of constraining probabilistic accounts also points to
a significant weakness. The weakness is that these accounts seem particularly
ill-placed to provide us with any sort of justification for abductive reasoning
thus understood. In particular, we can ask the constraining probabilist where
these constraints on rational probability assignments are supposed to come
from: In virtue of what is it rational to assign a higher prior conditional prob-
ability to hypotheses that provide “better” explanations? Some constraining
probabilists have suggested that only by constraining probabilities in this way
can we avoid inductive skepticism, that is, the conclusion that past observa-
tions give us no justification for our predictions of future observations.19 But
it’s not clear that this gives us any reason to think that rationality requires such
constraints, as opposed to giving us reasons to think – wishfully – that it would
be nice if it did.
In this regard, another sort of probabilistic account seems to do better.
Following Henderson (2014), I will refer to these as emergent probabilistic
accounts. Emergent probabilistic accounts do not impose any explanation-
based constraints on the prior probabilities one starts out with before condi-
tionalizing on evidence. Rather, they hold that preferences for hypotheses that
provide better explanations are automatically reflected in the likelihoods of
theories, given certain natural and independently-motivated assumptions about

how prior probabilities should be distributed. For instance, Henderson (2014,
2017) argues that the scientific theories that provide better explanations are
those whose parameters or auxiliaries require less “fine-tuning” in order for the
theories to provide explanations of the relevant data. Given natural choices of
prior probabilities, argues Henderson, this implies that theories which provide
better explanations in this sense are also more probable according to Bayesian-
ism. In a similar vein, McGrew (2003) argues that a theory’s capacity to explain
many different types of facts can be shown to pick out theories that Bayesians
should regard as more probable under natural assumptions about what rational
agents’ prior probability distributions will be like.
19 See Weisberg (2009) and especially Huemer (2009); although see also Smithson (2017) for a
rebuttal of Huemer’s argument.
An interestingly different emergent probabilistic account is provided by

Lange (2022). Lange suggests that the preference for hypotheses that provide
better explanations of some evidence E is due to the explanations being of the
same kind as various explanations of other facts E1, . . . , Em , where we have
independent reasons to regard the latter explanations as correct. Provided that
we have reason to be confident that the explanations of E, on the one hand, and
of E1, . . . , Em , on the other hand, will be of the same kind, Lange argues that we
must, by Bayesian lights, regard the explanation of E to be more probable than
it would otherwise be in virtue of its having the same kind of explanation as
do E1, . . . , Em (Lange, 2022, 99). To illustrate with an everyday example, sup-
pose that when an electronic device stops working in my home, it has usually
or always turned out to be because a single component of that device is mal-
functioning. Thus, when my remote control stops working today, I have some
reason to think there is some single component of the remote that is malfunc-
tioning – assuming of course that I regard it likely that this new event has the
same type of explanation as the previous events, perhaps because all of these
cases involve electronic devices. In this way, a local probabilistic preference
for simpler theories would arise naturally on Lange’s account, that is, without
the account having to appeal to some specific list of explanatory virtues that
always count in a theory’s favor.
An important advantage of emergent over constraining probabilistic
accounts is that the former seem to offer an independent justification for
preferring more explanatory hypothesis. Rather than simply stipulating that
rationality requires us to prefer more explanatory hypotheses, emergent prob-
abilistic accounts purport to explain why such a preference would arise under
natural assumptions about prior probability distributions. To be sure, there
remains for the emergent probabilist a closely related problem of explaining
why the “natural” assumptions about prior probability distributions should be
taken to be correct – or indeed why they deserve to be called “natural.”20 So
proponents of constraining probabilistic accounts may retort that the suppos-
edly problematic step of postulating certain constraints on prior probabilities
in order to accommodate preferences for more explanatory hypotheses has a
close analogue in the arguments given by emergent probabilists.
2.4 Hybrid Accounts

Thus far we have explored inferential and probabilistic accounts of abduc-
tive reasoning, which respectively see abductive reasoning as a sui generis
20 Here, we are bumping up against a well-known fundamental challenge for Bayesianism,

namely the problem of priors (see, e.g., Easwaran, 2011, 326–327).
type of inference in which theories are accepted on the basis of explanatory

considerations, on the one hand, or as a preference for better explaining theo-
ries in probabilistic updating, on the other. The third type of account combines
aspects of these two types of accounts. These hybrid accounts hold that abduc-
tive reasoning manifests itself both as a specific type of inference, such as
IBE, and also as a preference for better explaining theories in an otherwise
probabilistic approach to scientific reasoning.21
One way to develop a hybrid account is to argue that agents engage in two
quite distinct forms of abductive reasoning that have little to do with each other.
In particular, one might take inspiration from epistemologists who maintain that
full beliefs and credences are distinct, and yet equally real and fundamental,
types of attitudes (see, e.g., Weisberg, 2020; Jackson and Tan, 2022). These two
types of attitudes would give rise to two distinct forms of reasoning, inferential
and probabilistic, which would occur simultaneously and independently in a
single agent. Importantly for our purposes, these two forms of reasoning could
both be influenced by explanatory considerations – although not necessarily the
same explanatory considerations in each case. For example, one could argue
that rational agents form full beliefs by employing a Harman-style IBE while
simultaneously updating their personal probabilities by awarding bonuses to
more explanatory theories, as per Abductive Conditionalization. We might call
this a dualistic account of abductive reasoning.
Another way to develop a hybrid account is to argue that one of the two
types of reasoning is in some way more fundamental than the other. In particu-
lar, several philosophers have suggested that some form of explanation-based
inference, such as IBE, might serve as a reliable heuristic device to approxi-

mate correct probabilistic reasoning.22 The motivating thought here is that it is
generally much easier and straightforward for nonideal agents to successfully
make abductive inferences such as IBE than to correctly perform any kind of
probabilistic updating. After all, the latter requires agents to keep track of the
probabilities they should assign at a given time to both hypotheses and potential
21 To be clear, hybrid accounts need not be thought of as alternatives to inferential and probabi-
listic accounts; rather, it may be more fruitful to view a given hybrid account as a combination
of some particular inferential or probabilistic account with some additional claims borrowed
from, or inspired by, the other type of account. In particular, the specific hybrid account dis-
cussed towards the end of this section may be viewed as a combination of a probabilistic
account of abductive reasoning and the claim that a form of IBE serves as a reliable heuristic
for approximating the type of reasoning prescribed by that probabilistic account.
22 Such accounts have been proposed and developed in a number of different ways in recent years,
for example, by Niiniluoto (1999), Okasha (2000), Lipton (2001), McGrew (2003), Cabrera
(2017), and Dellsén (2018). It has also been argued that abductive reasoning is more fundamen-
tal than Bayesian, for example, because the latter is merely an idealized model of the former
(McCain and Moretti, 2022).
evidence, which in turn requires repeatedly calculating conditional probabili-

ties from priors and likelihoods. By contrast, an inferential procedure such as
IBE does not require agents to assign probabilities to anything, or to constantly
update those probabilities in light of new information. All it requires is that
agents occasionally estimate how well a number of already-formulated theories
explain the evidence they have obtained at that time.
The thought that probabilistic reasoning is too difficult for ordinary agents is
supported by robust psychological results suggesting that people are in general
prone to systematic biases in probabilistic reasoning, and that such biases are
present even among those who are familiar with probabilistic reasoning (see,
e.g., Kahneman et al., 1982; Kahneman, 2011). These results indicate that it
may be a bad idea for ordinary agents to even try to engage directly in prob-
abilistic reasoning on a day-to-day basis – even if such probabilistic updating
is what is ideally rational (i.e., rational for ideal agents that don’t suffer from
systematic biases and other cognitive limitations). Furthermore, whether or not
we ought to engage in probabilistic updating, it seems quite clear from these
results that few of us do engage in it, except perhaps when we are specifically
prompted to do so, for example, when the hypotheses in question explicitly
refer to probabilities. In Kahneman’s terminology, we mostly engage in the
faster and more automatic “System 1” thinking, as opposed to the slower and
more effortful “System 2” thinking in which careful probabilistic calculations
would take place.
These considerations give rise to what we may call the heuristic account
of abductive reasoning. On this account, the ideal form of scientific reasoning
would be probabilistic through and through. However, since ordinary agents

are often unable or poorly situated to engage in such reasoning, they approx-
imate it by instead making abductive inferences, such as IBEs, which deliver
results sufficiently similar to those that would result from reasoning probabilis-
tically in an ideally rational way. In contrast to the dualistic account sketched
above, the heuristic account thus sees probabilistic reasoning as normatively
more fundamental, in that it is the ultimate standard of evaluation for scientific
reasoning that abductive inferences should in some way approximate. With that
said, proponents of heuristic accounts typically argue that abductive inferences
are more ubiquitous than explicitly probabilistic reasoning, in that it is the type
of reasoning in which most human agents in fact most commonly engage (see,
e.g., Keil, 2006; Lombrozo, 2010).
Of course, abductive inference can only serve as a heuristic in this way if it
does in fact approximate normatively correct probabilistic reasoning. With that
said, abductive inference need not accord with probabilistic reasoning exactly
and in every case in order to serve as a heuristic in this sense, since — just as
with any other heuristic — it may fail in extraordinary cases and provide only
a rough guide in normal cases. So does abductive inference at least approx-

imate normatively correct probabilistic reasoning in most, or at least many,
cases? In order to make the case that it does, the heuristic account may take
a leaf out of the book of probabilistic accounts, which (let us recall) suggest
that preferences for better explaining hypotheses either constrain, or emerge
from, rational agents’ prior probability assignments. In either case, it seems
that we should expect abductive inferences generally to recommend accepting
the theories that are most probable by Bayesian lights, because both forms of
reasoning are influenced by the same set of considerations, namely explanatory
considerations.
To illustrate this point, consider Okasha’s (2000) example of a doctor who
examines an injured child and forms two competing hypotheses: that they have
pulled a muscle (H1 ); and that they have torn a ligament (H2 ). The doctor
decides that H2 offers the better explanation of the observed symptoms and,
using IBE, therefore tentatively accepts H2 . When asked to explain her reason-
ing, the doctor says: “firstly, preadolescent children very rarely pull muscles,
but often tear ligaments. Secondly, the symptoms, though compatible with
either diagnosis, are exactly what we would expect if the child has torn a
ligament, though not if [the child] has pulled a muscle. Therefore the sec-
ond hypothesis is preferable” (Okasha, 2000, 703). According to Okasha, this
reasoning coincides with the following probabilistic argument for assigning a
higher probability to H2 than to H1 : “given the background information, the
prior probability of H2 is higher than that of H1 [i.e., Pr(H1 ) < Pr(H2 )]; the
probability of the evidence conditional on H2 is greater than its probability
conditional on H1 [i.e., Pr(E|H1 ) < Pr(E|H2 )], therefore the posterior proba-
bility of H2 is greater than that of H1 [i.e., Pr′(H1 ) < Pr′(H2 )]” (Okasha, 2000,
702–703).23
Note, though, that Okasha’s suggestion about IBE coinciding with probabi-
listic updating only works if we go along with his probabilistic assumptions,
that is, that Pr(H1 ) < Pr(H2 ) and Pr(E|H1 ) < Pr(E|H2 ). This is of course
precisely what probabilistic accounts suggest we should do in different ways.
Specifically, constraining probabilistic accounts hold that because H2 explains
better than H1 , rationality requires us to assign probabilities so as to favor H2
over H1 in some such way; while emergent probabilistic accounts hold that this
probabilistic favoring of H2 over H1 falls out of other, independently-motivated
constraints on prior probability assignments. By contrast, if one completely
rejects the idea that more explanatory hypotheses should be assigned higher
23 To see why the third inequality follows from the first two, recall from Section 2.3 that
Pr′ (H1 ) < Pr′ (H2 ) is, given Bayesian Conditionalization, equivalent to Pr(E|H1 ) Pr(H1 ) <
Pr(E|H2 ) Pr(H2 ).
prior probabilities, then Okasha’s suggestion will not be compelling, for then
the doctor’s IBE-based inference might coincide with it being rational to assign
lower probabilities to hypotheses that provide “better” explanations, for exam-
ple, in that Pr(H1 ) > Pr(H2 ) and/or Pr(H1 |E) > Pr(H2 |E) (Weisberg, 2009,
132–136). For this reason, heuristic accounts of abductive reasoning must argu-
ably assume that rational probability assignments favor hypotheses that provide
better explanations, as per probabilistic accounts.
Another issue for heuristic accounts concerns what sort of conclusion an
abductive inference would warrant while at the same time approximating prob-
abilistic reasoning. Initially one might have hoped that abductive inferences
would warrant something like a high probability assignment to (and thus, per-
haps, a full belief in)24 the inferred hypothesis. However, note that this is not
the type of conclusion that is drawn in Okasha’s example, where the doctor
merely concludes that “the posterior probability of H2 is greater than that of
H1 ,” that is, that Pr′(H1 ) < Pr′(H2 ). This is a comparative claim, regarding the
relative probabilities of H1 and H2 . As such it is compatible with H1 and H2
being assigned arbitrarily low probabilities in absolute terms, and so would not
necessarily warrant an assignment of high probability to (let alone full belief in)
either H1 or H2 . Indeed, it is hard to see how the doctor’s abductive reasoning
in Okasha’s example could provide her with a conclusion more definite than the
claim about the relative probabilities of H1 and H2 , since even the abductive
argument deals in comparative claims about which type of injury is more com-
mon in children, on the one hand, and which injury better fits the symptoms,
on the other.
One might think that this comparative structure to Okasha’s example is inci-
dental, and that a heuristic account could be developed in which abductive
inference serves as a heuristic for absolute, as opposed to merely compara-
tive, probability assignments. However, Dellsén (2018, 1753–1760) presents
a problem for heuristic accounts of this sort. As should be apparent from how
Bayes’s Theorem combines with Bayesian Conditionalization (see §2.3), the
absolute posterior probability of H1 , Pr′(H1 ), is determined not only by the
prior Pr(H1 ) and the likelihood Pr(E|H1 ), but also by Pr(E). This term – the
probability of the evidence itself, sometimes called the marginal likelihood –
is notoriously difficult to estimate with any reliability, because Bayesianism
dictates that it must be equal to a weighted sum of the priors and likelihoods
of all competing hypotheses in logical space, including not only H1 and H2 but
also any other hypotheses that are yet to be formulated – and perhaps never
24 The parenthetical remark assumes a “Lockean” account of the relationship between personal
probability and full belief (see, e.g., Foley, 1992).
will (see, e.g., Shimony, 1970; Salmon, 1990; Roush, 2005).25 Moreover, the
various explanatory considerations that are supposed to guide abductive infer-
ence do not seem to be of much help in estimating this term, since they refer
to either to features of the hypotheses themselves or their relationship with
the evidence, not to features of other hypotheses or their relationship with the
evidence.
For these sorts of reasons, Dellsén (2018) suggests that IBE cannot generally
serve as a reliable heuristic for absolute probability assignments. However, on
Dellsén’s view, this does not spell disaster for the heuristic account of abduc-
tive reasoning, since IBE can still serve as a reliable heuristic for probabilistic
comparisons of the sort we saw in Okasha’s example. Although such compar-
ative conclusions are sometimes less informative than we would like – since
they don’t tell us how confident we ought to be that a specific theory is true –
they can still provide a great deal of rational guidance for the practicing scien-
tist. For example, the comparative conclusion that H2 (torn ligament) is more
probable than H1 (pulled muscle) might prompt Okasha’s doctor to order diag-
nostic tests focused on the child’s ligament rather than the muscle. In this sense,
H2 becomes the doctor’s “working hypothesis.” So, in short, the comparative
conclusion that some particular hypotheses are more probable than their rivals
can help practicing scientists to focus their subsequent investigations on the
most probable of such hypotheses.
It’s worth noting that Dellsén’s argument that IBE can only serve as a heu-
ristic for probabilistic comparisons is targeted at standard formulations of IBE
of the sort advocated by Harman (1965) and Lipton (2004). Thus an alterna-
tive way to avoid the argument is to modify one’s account of IBE, or abductive
inference more generally, so that it better fits with what is required of rational
agents who wish to make absolute probability assignments. A plausible thought
is that this might be done by requiring not only that the inferred hypothesis pro-
vides a better explanation than its extant rivals, but also that the explanation
be good enough in some sense (Musgrave, 1988; Lipton, 2004). Indeed, Dell-
sén (2021) makes a concrete suggestion along these lines, arguing that a more
demanding form of IBE – which requires an agent to go through a temporally
extended process of gathering more evidence and attempting to formulate supe-
rior explanations – is capable of delivering absolute verdicts. We will examine
this suggestion, along with other similar suggestions, in Section 4. For now,
however, let us simply note that such suggestions involve modifying IBE quite
substantially from what it is normally taken to involve.
∑
25 That is, Pr(E) = nk=1 Pr(Hk ) Pr(E|Hk ), where H1 , . . . , Hn are mutually exclusive and jointly
exhaustive hypotheses.
3 Why Prefer Explanatory Hypotheses?

This section focuses on the fact that in abductive reasoning, one infers or
assigns a higher probability to the hypothesis that best explains one’s evidence.
But what grounds, if any, are there for preferring hypotheses that provide bet-
ter explanations in this way? To begin to answer this question, we’ll start by
considering in more detail what different authors mean by saying that one
hypothesis provides a “better explanation” than another (§3.1). We then con-
trast two quite different possible reasons for preferring better explanations,
based respectively on epistemic and pragmatic considerations (§3.2). These
contrasting views are then put to the test in the following two sections by con-
sidering two different ways in which some hypotheses are often said to explain
better than others, namely, with respect to the extent to which the hypothe-
sis explains a greater range of phenomena (§3.3), and the extent to which the
hypothesis posits fewer things with which to do the explaining (§3.4).
3.1 Conceptions of Explanatory Goodness

In order to address the question of what justifies a preference for hypotheses
that best explain one’s evidence, we must first get clearer on what might be
meant by saying that one hypothesis “explains better” than another hypothesis.
In short, we must ask: What is explanatory goodness?
The most popular answer to this question derives from Harman (1965).
Recall that according to Harman, the judgment that one hypothesis explains bet-
ter than another “will [presumably] be based on considerations such as which
hypothesis is simpler, which is more plausible, which explains more, which

is less ad hoc, and so forth” (Harman, 1965, 89). Harman’s suggestion, then,
is to conceive of explanatory goodness in terms of a list of seemingly inde-
pendent factors, now often referred to as explanatory virtues, which jointly
determine the explanatory goodness of a given hypothesis. This idea has been
adopted by most theorists of abductive reasoning, many of whom have also
developed it by providing their own list of such virtues, and associated descrip-
tions of what they amount to (e.g., Thagard, 1978; Lycan, 1985; Mackonis,
2011; Poston, 2014). Call this the virtue-theoretic conception of explanatory
goodness.
A crucial question for the virtue-theoretic conception is, of course, which
factors count as “explanatory virtues” for its purposes. Among the more popular
and widely discussed such virtues are the following:26
26 See Beebe (2009) for an unusually comprehensive list of various proposed explanatory virtues.
Scope: How many different phenomena (or types thereof) would the hypoth-
esis explain?
Parsimony: How few new entities (or types thereof) are posited by the
hypothesis or its explanations?
Unification: To what extent does the hypothesis unify otherwise disparate
phenomena (or types thereof)?
Plausibility: How well does the hypothesis fit what one already takes oneself
to know?
Analogy: How similar is the hypothesis’ explanations to other established
explanations?
Numerous other putative explanatory virtues have been proposed as well, such
as: the simplicity or elegance with which the hypothesis is formulated; its fer-
tility or fruitfulness for further research; the testability or falsifiability of the
hypothesis; and the extent to which it doesn’t contain ad hoc elements. More-
over, various authors use different terms for the virtues described above.27 It
should be said that many of the features that have been described as explana-
tory virtues in the context of abductive reasoning have long been thought of as
good-making features of scientific theories even by authors who might not con-
sider themselves proponents of abductive reasoning (e.g., Kuhn, 1977; Quine
and Ullian, 1978; Laudan, 1984).28
There is considerable disagreement regarding which of these features should
be taken to be operative in abductive reasoning. Consider, for example, the
supposed explanatory virtue of testability, which refers to the extent to which
a theory has readily testable consequences (see, e.g., Lycan, 1988, 138; Beebe,
2009, 611). Although it would of course be good, in a general sense of the
term, to have theories that are more testable, it does not seem plausible that
the testability of a theory makes it more likely to be true. Rather, testability is
a good-making feature only in that it will be easier to find out whether more
testable theories are true. Similarly, whether or not a theory is formulated in a
conceptually simple or elegant way is arguably not something that indicates that
the theory is more likely to be true29 ; rather, it merely suggests that the theory
27 For example, it is quite common to use “simplicity” for what I call “parsimony.” This can
be misleading because, as noted above, there is another kind of simplicity which concerns
the way in which a theory is formulated. “Parsimony,” by contrast, refers to the ontological
commitments made by the theory rather than any aspect of how it is formulated.
28 Indeed, Elliott (2021) suggests that there is nothing specifically explanatory about at least
some of these features, and that they should therefore be described as “theoretical” rather than
“explanatory” virtues.
29 For a quick argument to that effect, note that a simply or elegantly stated theory will be
materially equivalent to any number of more cumbersomely stated theories. Since materially
is easier to work with, for example because it’s easier to derive predictions and
explanations from it.
To analyze this situation, it can be helpful to bring in a distinction between
epistemic and pragmatic virtues. Epistemic virtues are features of a theory that
provide some indication, however fallible, that the virtuous theory is more
likely to be true. Pragmatic virtues, by contrast, are features that come with
some pragmatic or practical benefit, such as making it more convenient to use
the theory for various purposes. In principle, a given explanatory virtue could
be both epistemic and pragmatic, but oftentimes calling something a pragmatic
virtue tacitly carries the implication that it is not also an epistemic virtue. For
instance, in light of the previous paragraph, it seems plausible that testabil-
ity and simplicity/elegance are (merely) pragmatic virtues. By contrast, most
proponents of abductive reasoning argue that at least some of the other virtues
listed above, for example, scope and parsimony, are epistemic virtues, although
they don’t always agree on which ones enjoy this special status. (More on these
virtues in §§3.3–3.4 below.).
Regardless of which explanatory virtues are operative in abductive reason-
ing, and whether these are epistemic or (merely) pragmatic, one might wonder
how exactly these virtues are supposed to determine the overall explanatory
goodness of a hypothesis. This issue has been addressed in some detail regard-
ing theory choice in general, where Okasha (2011) in effect argues that certain
seemingly-plausible constraints on determining which theory does best over-
all with respect to some number of explanatory virtues cannot all be satisfied.
In particular, Okasha suggests that – contrary to what one might have thought
beforehand – determining which theory does best overall requires one to esti-
mate not only which theories do better than other theories with regard to
particular virtues, but also how much better these theories are doing with regard
to these virtues. If Okasha is right, then a scientist who wants to determine
which theory provides the overall best explanation must find some way of
measuring how much more or less scope, parsimony, and so forth, each theory
has in comparison to its rivals.30
Thus far we have considered the virtue-theoretic conception of explanatory
goodness in various guises. The virtue-theoretic conception is assumed in most
discussions of abductive reasoning, but Lipton (2004), interestingly, appears to
equivalent theories are, necessarily, equally likely to be true, it follows that a theory’s sim-
plicity (in this sense of the term – see footnote 27) cannot be positively correlated with its
probability.
30 For a critical discussion of Okasha’s argument, see Morreau (2015) and Stegenga (2015);
although see also Okasha (2015) for replies. In a somewhat different context, Priest (2016)
provides a nicely precise way of aggregating theoretical virtues that would be congenial to
Okasha’s suggestion.
endorse an alternative conception of explanatory goodness. On Lipton’s view,

explanatory goodness (or “loveliness,” as he calls it) is determined by how
much understanding an explanatory hypothesis would provide if it were true.
The greater or deeper the understanding that would be provided by the hypoth-
esis, the “lovelier” it is – and to that extent it is to be preferred or inferred in IBE
(Lipton, 2004, 59–60). Following Elliott (2021), let us call this the subjunctive
conception of explanatory goodness.
Now, the subjunctive and virtue-theoretic conceptions of explanatory good-
ness are clearly conceptually distinct, so one might suspect that Lipton’s
endorsement of the subjunctive conception would be backed up by arguments
against the virtue-theoretic conception. Not so. Instead, Lipton (2004, 122–
123) adopts a conciliatory position according to which our judgments of the
relative “loveliness” of two explanatory hypotheses (made according to the
subjunctive conception) tend to match the extent to which the explanatory
virtues favor one of the hypotheses over the other. It should be said, however,
that Lipton’s discussion of this issue is brief, and Lipton is explicitly noncom-
mittal about what counts as an explanatory virtue. Furthermore, Lipton says
little about what it is for one hypothesis to provide us with “more understand-
ing” than another, that is, what “loveliness” consists in. This makes Lipton’s
proposal difficult to evaluate.
A more thorough examination of the issue is provided by Elliott (2021),
who argues that the subjunctive and virtue-theoretic conceptions often diverge
in their judgments regarding whether one hypothesis explains “better” than
another (see also Barnes, 1995). For example, Elliott contrasts two hypothe-
ses that could be used to explain why we can observe light from stars that are
extremely far away. The first is the commonly accepted hypothesis that “the
universe is around 13.8 billion years old and the speed of light is constant in a
vacuum.” This explains why we see such distant stars by assuming that light
has had a very long time to travel, at a constant speed, from the stars to us.
A second hypothesis, inspired by creationism, is that “the universe is 6,000-
10,000 years old and the speed of light has been slowing since the creation
of the universe.” This hypothesis purports to explain why we can see distant
stars by assuming that light was travelling at a much greater speed, allowing
it to cover all that distance between us and them in only 6,000–10,000 years.
Now, the first of these hypotheses seems to exhibit the theoretical virtues to a
greater degree than the second, for example in that it has greater plausibility in
light of background knowledge, and is less ad hoc in so far as it posits a con-
stant where the second posits a variable that must be fine-tuned to explain the
data. However, according to Elliott, neither hypothesis would, if true, provide
more understanding than the other. After all, each one would, if true, make our
observations of distant stars perfectly comprehensible, leaving no mystery as

to why these stars are visible.
From this example and others like it Elliott concludes that the two concep-
tions – the subjective and the virtue-theoretic – are not extensionally equivalent.
Furthermore, since the first of the above hypotheses is clearly more plausible
than the second, the virtue-theoretic conception is better suited to spelling out
the notion of explanatory goodness with which a plausible account of abductive
reasoning would operate. Thus, not only do the subjunctive and virtue-theoretic
conceptions diverge; when they do diverge, Elliott suggests that the virtue-
theoretic conception should be preferred over the subjunctive alternative that
Lipton seems to endorse. A further reason to prefer the virtue-theoretic con-
ception is that it is quite unclear what the subjunctive conception amounts to,
since Lipton does not say what it would be for one hypothesis to provide “more
understanding” than another. At the very least, it seems clear that the subjunc-
tive conception is at this point not yet sufficiently developed to challenge the
virtue-theoretic conception. For this reason, I will for the most part assume a
virtue-theoretic conception in what remains of this Element.
3.2 Do Explanatory Virtues Track Truth?

In light of the previous section, it seems that the most plausible conception of
what it is for one hypothesis to “explain better” than another appeals to var-
ious explanatory virtues. Equipped with this conception of what explanatory
goodness would be, let us now turn to the question of why we should prefer
hypotheses that provide better explanations in this sense. (We should keep in
mind, however, that one’s view of why explanatorily better theories should
be preferred will clearly depend, at least to some extent, on what explanatory
goodness is. In particular, certain views about why explanatorily better theories
should be preferred work best when the list of explanatory virtues is restricted
to those that are plausibly viewed as epistemic, as opposed to merely pragmatic,
virtues.)
The simplest and perhaps most popular answer is that we should prefer
hypotheses that explain better because they are more likely to be true – or,
perhaps, more likely to be approximately true.31 Given the virtue-theoretic
conception of explanatory goodness, this amounts to the view that the explan-
atory virtues that are operative in abductive reasoning are truth-conducive: if
a hypothesis possesses these virtues to a greater extent than alternatives, that
31 I will drop this qualification in what follows to simplify discussion, but see Psillos (1999) and
especially Niiniluoto (2018) on the issue of approximate truth and its relation to abductive
reasoning.
hypothesis is thereby more likely to be true, other things being equal. Since
the idea that established scientific theories are likely to be true is often asso-
ciated with scientific realism (Chakravartty, 2017, §1.1), let us call this view
realism about explanatory goodness. As we shall see, there are two importantly
different versions of this view. These hold, respectively, that there are empiri-
cal reasons for thinking that better explaining hypotheses are more likely to be
true – call this a posteriori realism – and that this can be demonstrated without
appealing to empirical considerations – call this a priori realism.
One can of course reject both types of realism about explanatory goodness.
Antirealism about explanatory goodness holds that better explaining hypothe-
ses are not, as such, likelier to be true than those that explain worse. Given the
virtue-theoretic conception of explanatory goodness, this amounts to the view
that the explanatory virtues that are operative in abductive reasoning are not
truth-conducive. Now, antirealists generally think that at least some explana-
tory virtues are pragmatic virtues, so there is a sense in which they endorse
abductive reasoning, albeit only for pragmatic purposes (van Fraassen, 1980,
87–90). Let us call this pragmatic antirealism. With that said, antirealists could
also reject entirely the idea that explanatory goodness, or explanatory virtues,
have any role to play in science. In that case, there would arguably be little left
to endorse in the idea of abductive reasoning, so antirealists of this ilk would
really be suggesting to do away with abductive reasoning entirely. Let us call
this eliminative antirealism.
Arguments for and against various realist and antirealists views of explan-
atory goodness have tended to focus on the truth-conduciveness of some
particular explanatory virtue or virtues. Indeed, as we shall see, it is perfectly

reasonable to hold that some of the explanatory virtues with which abductive
reasoning operates are truth-conducive while others are not, and so be a realist
about some virtues an antirealist about others. In order to focus the discussion,
let us concentrate on two of the more widely discussed explanatory virtues,
namely scope and parsimony. As we shall see, the debates between realists and
antirealists regarding these two virtues play out in quite different ways.
3.3 Scope: Explaining More

Let’s start by considering scope. Recall that this refers to the extent to which
a given hypothesis explains many different phenomena (or types thereof).
This feature of some theories was famously discussed by William Whewell
(1858), who coined the term “consilience of inductions.” For Whewell, this
term applies to cases in which a theory receives support from different or unre-
lated pieces of evidence, as opposed to being supported by evidence that is
similar or closely related. Whewell argued that this amounts to an especially

powerful reason to accept a theory:
That rules springing from remote and unconnected quarters should thus leap
to the same point, can only arise from that being the point where the truth
resides. [ … ] Accordingly the cases in which inductions from classes of
facts altogether different have thus jumped together, belong only to the best
established theories which the history of science contains (Whewell, 1858,
88).
Whewell’s point here is not just that a theory is more likely to be true if it fits
a greater amount of evidence, but that the theory is especially likely to be true
if the various pieces of evidence that support it are “altogether different”.
For a concrete example of how this explanatory virtue gets used in scien-
tific reasoning, consider Darwin’s argumentative strategy in On the Origin of
Species (1962). Darwin went to great lengths to present various different types
of facts in support of his theory. That is, Darwin did not simply appeal to a
single type of evidence over and over, even though that would certainly have
been much easier. Instead, Darwin appealed to, among other things: (i) differ-
ences in flora and fauna across regions separated by geographical barriers, such
as oceans; (ii) similarities in certain parts of the anatomies of entirely distinct
species, such as the human hand and the wings of bats; and (iii) fossil records
of some now-extinct ancestors to current species. Indeed, when summarizing
his case for natural selection, Darwin explicitly notes that his theory explains
“several large classes of facts” (Darwin, 1962, 476), suggesting that his argu-
ment was deliberately driven by the desire to demonstrate his theory’s superior
scope.
How might a realist about explanatory goodness argue that scope is an indi-
cator of truth? One possibility is to take an empirical, or a posteriori, approach.
In particular, one might suggest that the history of science is full of examples
in which a theory that explains a greater number of different phenomena has
turned out to be true more often than rival theories that explain less. This seems
to have been Whewell’s approach, who examined a number of the “best estab-
lished” physical theories of the day and concluded that a great many exhibited
“consilience,” that is, scope, to an impressive extent.32 One problem with this
approach, however, is that in order to evaluate consilience is an indicator of
truth one would have to assume that the supposedly “best established” theories
at a given time are also true (or at least approximately true). Antirealists about
32 For some more recent implementation of this type of strategy of arguing for the truth-
conduciveness of explanatory goodness generally, see Boyd (1980), McMullin (1987), Salmon
(1990), and Psillos (1999).
explanatory goodness might legitimately complain that such an assumption is

blatantly question-begging, since they generally reject that the theories that are
considered “best established” at a given time are also true (or approximately
true). Furthermore, the antirealist might reject such an assumption on empiri-
cal grounds of their own, by pointing out that many of the theories on which
Whewell bases his argument, such as Newton’s law of universal gravitation
and Fresnel’s wave theory of light, have now been superseded by substantially
different theories of these phenomena.
Realists about scope may therefore instead take a nonempirical, a priori,
approach. This would involve arguing that there is something about the very
concept of scope as an explanatory virtue from which it follows that theories
with greater scope are more likely to be true. It is not clear how such an argu-
ment would proceed, since it seems clear that it is epistemically possible for
theories with less scope to be more frequently true. For this reason, an entirely
a priori argument for the unrestricted conclusion that scope is always truth-
conducive does not seem promising. One might instead settle for something
more modest, such as showing that there are certain commonly-satisfied condi-
tions under which such an a priori argument would go through. This is, in effect,
what some authors (e.g., Horwich, 1982; Earman, 1992; McGrew, 2003) have
done by proving or appealing to certain results in probability theory, where the
probabilistic results themselves are a priori while it is a posteriori whether the
conditions in which they are applicable are satisfied in a given case.
To get a sense for how these results work, consider a simple scenario in which
one hypothesis, H1 , explains some fact E1 but not another fact E2 ; while another
hypothesis, H2 , explains both E1 and E2 (and all else is equal). What needs to be
shown is that after obtaining E1 and E2 , the posterior probability of H2 would
be higher than that of H1 . Given Bayesian Conditionalization, this should occur
just in case one already assigns a higher probability to H2 conditional on E1 &E2
than to H1 conditional on E1 &E2 , that is, Pr(H1 |E1 &E2 ) < Pr(H2 |E1 &E2 ).
We already encountered this type of inequality in Section 2.3, except that in
place of a single “E” we now have “E1 &E2 .” Thus, for analogous reasons, this
inequality holds just in case:
Pr(E1 &E2 |H1 ) Pr(H1 ) < Pr(E1 &E2 |H2 ) Pr(H2 )
In order to hold all else equal, we may suppose that H1 and H2 do not differ in
their priors, so that Pr(H1 ) = Pr(H2 ). In that case the inequality reduces to:
Pr(E1 &E2 |H1 ) < Pr(E1 &E2 |H2 )
Since we are assuming that H2 explains both E1 and E2 , while H1 explains

only E1 , it might already seem plausible that H2 confers a higher likelihood
on E1 &E2 , that is, that the above inequality holds. However, to see more
clearly why this would be, let us rewrite each side of the inequality using
the probabilistic conjunction rule (which is another theorem of the probability
axioms):
Pr(E1 |H1 ) Pr(E2 |E1 &H1 ) < Pr(E1 |H2 ) Pr(E2 |E1 &H2 )
Since H1 and H2 both explain E1 , and all else is assumed to be equal, let us
also assume that Pr(E1 |H1 ) = Pr(E1 |H2 ). In that case, the above inequality
simplifies to:
Pr(E2 |H1 &E1 ) < Pr(E2 |H2 &E1 ) (∗)
Here, we have the key inequality to consider for comparisons of explanatory

scope. If (and only if) this inequality holds do the different pieces of evidence
E1 and E2 confer a greater probability on H2 than on H1 .
To see why it seems plausible that such an inequality would hold, recall first
that we are assuming that H2 explains E2 but that H1 does not. For this reason,
it seems that H2 by itself would confer a greater likelihood on E2 than H1 would
by itself. However, notice that the likelihoods in (∗) are likelihoods of E2 on
the conjunctions H1 &E1 and H2 &E1 . It is here that the fact that E1 and E2 are
different types of evidence comes to the fore. It is because E1 and E2 are of
different types that the fact that only H2 explains E2 makes a real difference to
the likelihoods of E2 on H1 &E1 and H2 &E1 respectively. Otherwise, namely
if E1 and E2 were the same type of evidence, the inclusion of E1 in each con-
junction would by itself raise each likelihood of E2 , so that Pr(E2 |H1 &E1 ) and
Pr(E2 |H2 &E1 ) would both be very high, and thus plausibly close to equal.33 By
contrast, if and in so far as E1 and E2 are different types of evidence, it seems
that Pr(E2 |H1 &E1 ) would be much lower than Pr(E2 |H2 &E1 ) in virtue of H2
being the only one of the two hypotheses that explains E2 .
To illustrate this point, let us return to Darwin’s evidence for natural
selection. Consider that Darwin appeals to both biological differences across
geographically separated regions (Eg ), on the one hand, and anatomical similar-
ities across different biological species (Ea ). And let’s contrast Darwin’s theory
of natural selection (Hn ), which explains both Eg and Ea , with a theory that
explains only Eg but not Ea , such as the theory that God created different spe-
cies specifically to inhabit different geographical regions (Hc ). Now, because
33 For example, suppose E1 is the evidence that a thousand ravens observed within some geo-
graphical region have all turned out to be black, and E2 is the evidence that yet another
raven also turned out to be black. In that case, it seems plausible that Pr(E2 |H1 &E1 ) and
Pr(E2 |H2 &E1 ) would both be close to 1, and thus close to equal, regardless of the content of
H1 and H2 .
this alternative theory Hc fails to explain Ea , and because Eg is a quite different

type of evidence than Ea – in the sense that one wouldn’t expect Ea to be the case
just because Eg is the case – it seems that Pr(Ea |Hc &Eg ) would be quite low.
At the very least, Pr(Ea |Hc &Eg ) will be low compared to Pr(Ea |Hn &Eg ), since
Hn does explain Ea : anatomical similarities between species are, according to
natural selection, explained by the fact that the species have a common ancestry
from which their anatomy has evolved. Thus Pr(Ea |Hc &Eg ) < Pr(Ea |Hn &Eg ).
Assuming all else is equal, and by the same probabilistic derivation as earlier,
we would thus have that Hn ends up with a higher posterior probability than
Hc : P′(Hc ) < P′(Hn ).
So we seem to have grounds for preferring hypotheses that explain a greater
range of different types of evidence, based in part on certain (a priori) facts
about probabilistic inequalities. How might an antirealist about explanatory
goodness respond to this argument? The most promising line of objection
would seem to involve not objecting to the probabilistic results themselves –
which follow from the probability axioms and are thus beyond reasonable dis-
pute – but rather to some of the assumptions or interpretations of these results.
For instance, an antirealist might argue that the fact that H2 explains unre-
lated pieces of evidence E1 and E2 does not imply that the inequality (∗) holds.
After all, the antirealist might respond, it’s not probabilistically incoherent to
assign probabilities such as to violate this inequality, even in cases of unre-
lated evidence such as Darwin’s evidence for natural selection. There is nothing
intrinsically incoherent about someone who assigns probabilities in some other
way, provided of course that they take care to assign probabilities to other
hypotheses in accordance with the probability calculus.

If there is a sense in which the fact that E1 and E2 are unrelated implies that
one must assign probabilities so that (∗) holds, the above argument would seem
to assume that there are constraints on permissible probability assignments
beyond merely satisfying the probability axioms. Perhaps it is simply part of
what it is to be fully rational to assign probabilities in such a way that for unre-
lated pieces of evidence, one’s probability assignments satisfy (∗). However,
the antirealist might easily reject any such requirements as obscure or unmo-
tivated. This is basically the line taken by van Fraassen, who argues that there
are no substantive constraints on permissible probability functions beyond sat-
isfying the probability axioms (van Fraassen, 1984, 2000). This means that
while an agent is certainly epistemically permitted to assign a higher proba-
bility to Pr(E2 |H2 &E1 ) than to Pr(E2 |H1 &E1 ), in accordance with (∗), she is
by no means epistemically obligated to do so. This fits van Fraassen’s more
general “voluntarist” epistemology, on which there are minimal constraints on
what agents are epistemically permitted to believe (van Fraassen, 2002, 2007).
Let us take stock. One of the most celebrated of the explanatory virtues is
scope, the extent to which a given hypothesis explains many different phenom-
ena, or types thereof. Realists regarding scope hold that it is an epistemic virtue,
that is, that hypotheses with greater scope are more likely to be true; whereas
antirealists hold that scope is, at most, a merely pragmatic consideration. Some
realists have argued their case by pointing to a supposed empirical correlation
between greater scope and (approximate) truth, but these arguments are based
on assumptions that antirealists have rejected as empirically false or question-
begging. A more promising argument for realism regarding scope appeals to
probability theory. If successful, this argument shows that hypotheses with
greater scope will – all other things being equal, and under certain plausible
conditions – have a greater probability of being true.
3.4 Parsimony: Positing Less

Let us move on to the other explanatory virtue on which we’ll be focusing,
parsimony. In most discussions, parsimony is defined as the extent to which
a hypothesis or its explanations postulate fewer new entities, or types thereof,
where “entities” is understood broadly to include anything that could be said to
exist.34 Parsimony is sometimes referred to as ontological simplicity, where the
qualifier “ontological” – although unfortunately sometimes dropped – indicates
that it is not to be confused with other forms of simplicity. In particular, a the-
ory is sometimes said to be simpler in the sense of consisting of fewer distinct
claims or principles; this is often referred to as syntactic simplicity or elegance
(Baker, 2022). By contrast, parsimony (i.e., ontological simplicity) concerns
not the number of claims or principles that constitute the theory itself, but the
number of entities, or types thereof, to which the theory is ontologically com-
mitted. In short, parsimony concerns the simplicity of the world according to
the theory, whereas syntactic simplicity or elegance concerns the simplicity of
the theory in and of itself.35
34 A distinction is sometimes drawn between qualitative and quantitative parsimony (Lewis,

1973, 87). Qualitative parsimony is the extent to which a hypothesis or its explanations posit
fewer new types of entities. Quantitative parsimony, by contrast, is the extent to which the
hypothesis or its explanations posit fewer entities, regardless of whether they are of the same
type or not. It is controversial whether the latter should be counted among the explanatory
virtues, and if so, whether it is truth-conducive (see Nolan, 1997; Baker, 2003; Jansson and
Tallant, 2017). In order to side-step this issue, I will throughout use “parsimony” in a general
sense that might refer either to qualitative or quantitative parsimony, or indeed to both.
35 As noted in footnote 29, it is hard to see how syntactic simplicity (i.e., elegance) could be truth-
conducive, since materially equivalent theories stated in different ways might differ greatly in
this respect and yet necessarily be equally probable.
It is sometimes suggested that parsimony can be shown to be truth-conducive

in a rather trivial way. This involves comparing two hypotheses, H1 and H2 ,
where H2 is identical to H1 except that H1 postulates some entities (or types
thereof) not postulated by H2 . If all else is equal, then H1 and H2 will never-
theless explain the same range of phenomena, and more generally be equally
virtuous in other respects. Thus, there is a clear sense in which the additional
entities (or types thereof) posited by H1 are explanatorily superfluous, and in
that way arguably unjustified (Schindler, 2018, 31–38). In a similar vein, one
might point out that if H1 is identical to H2 except in postulating additional
entities (or types thereof), then the probability of H2 must be higher than that
of H1 (Sober, 2015, 71). To see why, note that H2 would be true in all possible
scenarios in which H1 is true but not vice versa – in particular, H1 would not
be true if its additional entities (or types thereof) fail to exist, whereas in that
case H2 might still be true.36
However, this type of argument provides only a very limited defense of the
idea that parsimony is truth-conducive. After all, it applies only to cases in
which considerations of parsimony are brought in to adjudicate between theo-
ries that are identical except in that one postulates additional entities (or types
thereof) not posited by the other. Such cases are atypical. Much more common
are cases in which each theory posits some entities (or types thereof) not pos-
ited by the other. In such cases, although there is a difference in the number
of entities (or types thereof) posited by each theory, it is not the case that the
theory which posits the greater number of new entities (or types thereof) posits
all the entities (or types thereof) posited by the other theory. Relatedly, these
cases are generally not such that some of the entities (or types thereof) posited
by the less parsimonious theory are explanatorily superfluous; rather, from the
point of view of the less parsimonious theory, these entities (or types thereof)
are indeed necessary to explain some of the evidence.
Consider, for example, the difference between Ptolemy’s geocentric model
of the solar system, on the one hand, and Copernicus’s and Kepler’s helio-
centric models, on the other. Famously, the heliocentric models of Copernicus
and especially Kepler involved postulating fewer epicycles than the geocentric
model; indeed, these epicycles could eventually be eliminated entirely from
the heliocentric model. This is often taken to be a paradigmatic case of parsi-
mony influencing theory choice.37 However, note that the argument we are
36 More generally, it is a theorem of the probability axioms that if H1 implies H2 but not vice
versa, then Pr(H1 ) < Pr(H2 ).
37 See, for example, Galileo (1632, 397) and Sober (2015, 12–22). With that said, one could also
argue that the preference for the heliocentric model was due primarily to its superior syntactic
simplicity, which seems to be Kuhn’s (1977, 324) view, for instance.
currently considering cannot be used to explain the preference for the geo-
centric model in this case, since the geocentric model is clearly not identical
to the heliocentric model except in that it posits some additional entities. For
instance, the heliocentric model posits that all the planets revolve around the
Sun; whereas the geocentric model posits that the Sun and the other planets
revolve around the Earth. Relatedly, the geocentric model does not posit any
entities that are explanatorily superfluous from its own point of view: Given the
geocentric model’s core commitment to placing the Earth at the center of the
solar system, the various epicycles posited by that theory are all needed in order
to explain astronomical observations such as the apparent retrograde motion of
the other known planets (otherwise they would not have been posited in the first
place!).
So if there is a general argument for the truth-conduciveness of parsimony, it
cannot simply appeal to the supposed superfluousness of the entities (or types
thereof) posited by less parsimonious theories. How then might a realist about
explanatory goodness argue for their position regarding parsimony? As before,
there are two main options here. The first is to argue on a priori grounds that
more parsimonious theories are more likely to be true. In this vein, Swinburne
(1997, 1) claims that the truth-conduciveness of parsimony is “an ultimate [i.e.,
fundamental] a priori principle” that cannot itself be justified by anything else
(see also Biggs and Wilson, 2017). However, this claim is difficult to accept
since, as van Fraassen (1989, 147–148) points out, to claim that more parsi-
monious theories are more likely to be true seems to involve an assumption
that the world is more likely to contain fewer entities (or types thereof). That
assumption is surely a contingent matter and so not something that could be

ascertained a priori, but only (if at all) empirically.
The other option is to argue that parsimony is truth-conducive on that is,
empirical, grounds. Such arguments generally appeal to a naturalistic meth-
odology in which scientific practice itself is taken to be the best, if not the
only, indication of what types of theories are more and less likely to be true
(Baker, 2022, §4). In particular, some philosophers have suggested that scien-
tists do in fact prefer more parsimonious theories, and that the general success
of the scientific enterprise in getting at the truth suggests that this preference
can be taken to be truth-conducive (Boyd, 1980; Burgess, 1998; Baker, 2007).
Of course, antirealists might respond by suggesting that such an argument is
question-begging, because by their lights we have little or no reason to think
that the scientific enterprise is genuinely discovering the truth as opposed to,
for example, merely increasing its capacity to generate instrumentally useful
or empirically adequate theories (see, e.g., van Fraassen, 1980; Wray, 2018;
Rowbottom, 2019).
Another line of objection to the naturalistic, a posteriori, strategy for arguing

that parsimony is truth-conducive concerns whether scientists really do exhibit
a general preference for more parsimonious theories. Salmon (2001, 81) notes
that in some fields, such as anthropology and sociology, complex theories are
actually preferred over parsimonious theories on the grounds that complex phe-
nomena usually call for complex explanations (see also Day and Kincaid, 1994;
Lange, 2022). Similar remarks have been made by Francis Crick, the biologist
who discovered the helical structure of DNA along with James Watson. Crick
suggests that while parsimony “is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can
be a very dangerous implement in biology” (Crick, 1988, 138). Finally, Baker
(2007) considers cases from twentieth-century physics in which complexity
seems to have been preferred over parsimony, on the grounds that if it’s phys-
ically possible for an object to exist, then it (probably) actually exists. A case
in point is Paul Dirac’s consideration of the possible existence of magnetic
“monopoles,” that is, magnets with only one magnetic pole, within quantum
mechanics. Dirac argued that because such monopoles can exist according to
quantum mechanics, “one would be surprised if Nature had made no use of it”
(Dirac, 1931, 71).
These cases suggest that although parsimony is sometimes taken to be truth-
conducive by working scientists, sometimes the opposite of parsimony is taken
to be truth-conducive. Note, however, that in either case scientists are assum-
ing that there is a feature of the theory in question – namely, its parsimony or
lack thereof – that can be used to gauge how likely the theory is to be true (cf.
Lange, 2022, 97–98). Thus, there is a sense in which parsimony is still play-
ing an important role in abductive reasoning in such cases; it’s just that what
is normally taken to be an explanatory “vice” now effectively functions as a
virtue. Indeed, we can generalize this thought by noting that any theory can
presumably be located on a scale from maximally to minimally parsimonious.
In different circumstances, exactly where a theory is located on this scale could
be taken to indicate how likely it is to be true. For example, one might think
that, in certain domains, the correct explanations are most likely to exhibit a
degree of parsimony that is, say, high but not maximal. In that case, what func-
tions as an explanatory virtue could be not parsimony simpliciter, but rather
how close to high-but-not-maximal-parsimony the relevant theories are.
In my view, this points the way towards a plausible view not just of parsi-
mony, but of explanatory goodness in general, which in some ways transcends
the realism/antirealism divide. We might call it contextualism about explana-
tory goodness. On this view, which features of a theory are truth-conducive
depends on the “context,” that is, on the phenomenon to be explained and our
background beliefs about what sorts of explanations it most likely calls for.
These features could in principle be any readily-identifiable properties of a

theory, but in actual science they tend to concern the extent to which the theory
exhibits the explanatory virtues listed in Section 3.1, such as scope and par-
simony. Importantly, however, more does not always imply better, for one’s
background beliefs about a particular phenomenon might suggest that the cor-
rect explanation exhibits only a moderate degree of scope, a low degree of
parsimony, and so forth. If so, a theory with these characteristics should be
considered the “best” explanation – the one to be preferred or inferred – even
if another theory exhibits the explanatory virtues to a greater degree.
This is not the place to develop contextualism about explanatory goodness
in any detail, but it is worth commenting on how it relates to realism about
explanatory goodness. On my formulation, realism about some explanatory
virtue holds that this virtue is truth-conducive, that is, that hypotheses which
exhibit this virtue to a greater extent are more likely to be true, all other things
being equal. Contextualism denies this, in that it holds that there is no linear
or monotonic relationship between exhibiting the relevant virtue to a greater
extent and being more likely to be true. For example, contextualism about parsi-
mony may imply that, in certain contexts, a complex theory is likelier to be true
than a parsimonious one. Nevertheless, contextualism – like realism – allows
us to use explanatory virtues as a guide to truth, because the extent to which a
given hypothesis does (or doesn’t) exhibit explanatory virtues indicates, within
a given context, how likely the hypothesis is to be true.
Let us take stock again. The explanatory virtue of parsimony is the extent
to which a given hypothesis postulates fewer new entities, or types thereof.
Realists regarding parsimony hold that it is an epistemic virtue, that is, that
more parsimonious hypotheses are more likely to be true; whereas antireal-
ists hold that parsimony is, at most, a merely pragmatic consideration. Some
realists have argued that it is somehow a fundamental principle of rationality
that more parsimonious theories are likelier to be true. However, this seems to
conflict with the obvious fact that the universe could have contained a greater
rather than lesser number of entities (or types thereof). Other realists have
argued that scientists in fact prefer more parsimonious theories, and that the
general success of accepted scientific theories indicates that this practice is in
fact truth-conducive. However, an important counterpoint is that the prefer-
ence for parsimonious theories appears not to be universal; rather, scientists
sometimes prefer complex theories over more parsimonious ones. This sug-
gest that the correct view of whether explanatory virtues track the truth is a
“contextualist” one, according to which it depends on the context whether, and
to what extent, a more parsimonious theory is more likely to be true than a more
complex one.
4 Is Abductive Reasoning Irrational?

This section focuses on several challenges to the idea that abductive reasoning
is or could be rational. These challenges differ from the concerns voiced in the
previous section in that they target the structure of abductive reasoning rather
than any substantive assumptions about whether better explaining theories are
more likely to be true. In particular, these objections suggest that abductive rea-
soning – or at least some forms thereof – will lead reasoners to adopt attitudes
that are either outright incoherent or highly implausible by their own lights.
4.1 The Bad Lot Objection

As mentioned briefly in Section 2, one of the most influential challenges
to abductive reasoning is van Fraassen’s bad lot objection to IBE. In van
Fraassen’s own memorable words:
[Inference to the Best Explanation] is a rule that only selects the best among
the historically given hypotheses. We can watch no contest of the theories we
have so painfully struggled to formulate, with those no one has proposed. So
our selection may well be the best of a bad lot (van Fraassen, 1989, 142–143).
The basic problem pointed out by van Fraassen here is that we may have no
reason to think that any of the available explanatory hypotheses are true. The
hypotheses that have been generated so far may all be false, in which case the
correct explanation would be provided by a hypothesis outside of the set of
available hypotheses. In that case, IBE would inevitably lead us to accept a
false hypothesis, even if explanatory goodness tracks truth in a highly reliable

manner, and even if we can reliably identify the best explaining hypothesis
among those that are available at a given time.38
As it stands, van Fraassen’s objection simply points to a conceptual possi-
bility, namely that the true hypothesis may not have been made available. One
might think that the mere possibility that abductive reasoning goes wrong in
this way is not a strong argument against it, since any account of any form of
nondeductive reasoning will readily acknowledge that such reasoning is fal-
lible to some extent. However, in recent years van Fraassen’s objection has
been substantially bolstered by historical studies which suggest that working
scientists sometimes find themselves in precisely the situation described by
van Fraassen, in that every available theory about some phenomenon is, unbe-
knownst to them, false (e.g., Stanford, 2006; Wray, 2011; Kashyap, 2023).
38 The bad lot objection is also sometimes called the argument from underconsideration (Lipton,
1993; Wray, 2008; Khalifa, 2010).
During the nineteenth century, for example, Charles Darwin, Francis Galton,
and August Weisman each successively formulated and defended different false
theories of the mechanism of biological heredity. Arguably, none of these theo-
ries provides as good an explanation of biological heredity as the chromosome
theory of Boveri and Sutton, but the latter was not formulated until the early
twentieth century. So Darwin, Galton, and Weisman were evidently working
with a “bad lot” of explanatory hypotheses.39
This shows that the bad lot objection cannot be set aside as a mere con-
ceptual possibility with no relevance for actual scientific practice. However,
exactly what sort of problem the bad lot objection creates for abductive rea-
soning depends on what sort of account of abductive reasoning one endorses.
In Section 2, we distinguished between inferential, probabilistic, and hybrid
accounts of abductive reasoning. As noted then, van Fraassen originally con-
ceived of the bad lot objection as targeting a specific sort of inferential account,
namely IBE à la Harman (1965). Accordingly, most of the following discus-
sion in this section focuses on how inferential accounts, such as IBE, might
circumvent the bad lot objection. However, it is worth noting that the bad
lot objection is also a problem for hybrid accounts in so far as these involve
choosing an explanatory hypothesis among some set of available competing
hypotheses – all of which may be false – even if this choice is ultimately meant
to approximate a probabilistic evaluation of that hypothesis.
Indeed, at least some probabilistic accounts of abductive reasoning face a
version of the bad lot objection that is no less difficult to handle than the original
objection. In particular, consider what I called Abductive Conditionalization –
which, recall, is a version of Bayesian Conditionalization in which the hypoth-

esis H that best explains the evidence E is awarded a bonus probability b. Any
application of Abductive Conditionalization presupposes that one has already
formulated the hypothesis that in fact best explains E, since this is the hypoth-
esis that is supposed to receive a bonus probability. Thus, if and in so far as
one is uncertain about whether the hypothesis that best explains E has been
formulated, one would not be in a position to add the bonus probability to any
hypothesis (and subtract probability from other hypotheses – see §4.2). After
all, any formulated hypothesis might be “the best of a bad lot” in the sense
that it just provides the best explanation among a set of hypotheses that doesn’t
include the (as yet unformulated) hypothesis that in fact best explains E.40
39 These examples of theories of biological heredity are discussed in great detail by Stanford
(2006, chs. 3–5). It should be noted that Stanford is not focusing on IBE specifically, and that
Stanford refers to the problem he is concerned with as the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives
(for discussion, see, e.g., Magnus, 2010; Ruhmkorff, 2011; Egg, 2016; Dellsén, 2017d).
40 A somewhat similar problem faces what I have called constraining probabilistic accounts.
Recall that these accounts hold that hypotheses which provide better explanations should be
So, almost regardless of what sort of account of abductive reasoning one

endorses, it is imperative to find some way or other of responding the bad lot
objection. Dellsén (2017c) distinguishes between two different ways of doing
so: revisionary and reactionary responses to the bad lot objection. According
to revisionary responses, the bad lot objection should lead us to reformulate
IBE, or replace it with some other account of abductive reasoning, so as to
avoid or sidestep van Fraassen’s objection. As we shall see below, this can be
achieved in various ways, for example by adding some further conditions on the
applicability of abductive reasoning or by weakening the form of the conclusion
it is meant to warrant. According to reactionary responses, by contrast, there is
no need for revising or replacing IBE in this way because the bad lot objection
is, in one way or another, misguided or unpersuasive even when applied to the
original form of IBE to which van Fraassen objected. In what follows, let us
first consider two reactionary responses to the bad lot objection before turning
to some revisionary responses.
The most influential reactionary response to the bad lot objection is due to
Lipton (1993). As noted in Section 2, Lipton conceived of IBE as involving
two temporally distinct stages: (i) the generation of a set of rival explanatory
hypotheses, and (ii) the comparative evaluation of one of these hypotheses as
providing the “best” explanation. Now, although steps (i) and (ii) are distinct,
Lipton (1993, 96–99) suggests that someone who is capable of reliably compar-
ing a set of explanatory hypotheses in step (ii) will also be capable of reliably
generating the hypothesis that in fact provides the correct explanation in step
(i). The reason for this, according to Lipton, is that in order to carry out a reliable
comparative evaluation in step (ii), one must base that evaluation on a large set
of true background theories, and these true background theories would them-
selves have to have been generated in a step (i) of an earlier application of IBE.
So, says Lipton, one cannot consistently say that scientists are generally reli-
able at comparing explanatory hypotheses in step (ii) but not also reliable at
generating true hypotheses in step (i).
assigned higher probabilities before one updates on the evidence. So, in particular, if H2 is
explanatorily better than H1 , one should assign a higher value to Pr(H2 |E) than to Pr(H1 |E).
Now, if the best explanation of E is not yet formulated – call it Hx – then as a practical matter
one obviously cannot assign any probability to that hypothesis given the evidence, Pr(Hx |E).
Consequently, it becomes unclear what probability one should assign even to H1 or H2 given E,
because if some unformulated hypothesis Hx is to receive a greater share of the probability that
is to be distributed among various competing hypotheses, then some other of these hypotheses –
including, perhaps, H1 and H2 , must receive a lesser share of that probability (see §4.2). So
if one doesn’t know whether there is some unformulated Hx that in fact provides the best
explanation of one’s evidence, then one doesn’t know how to distribute probability even among
the hypotheses that have been formulated.
One possible rejoinder to Lipton’s response, on behalf of van Fraassen,

is that van Fraassen never claimed that scientists are generally reliable at
comparing explanatory hypotheses in step (ii). Although van Frassen never
explicitly argued that scientists are unreliable at making such comparisons,
he might take the bad lot objection, coupled with Lipton’s response, to con-
stitute an argument for that conclusion. However, as Lipton (1993, 98) in
effect points out, this would seem to commit proponents of the bad lot objec-
tion to a much more radically skeptical position according to which we have
little if any inductive powers at all. What made the bad lot objection inter-
esting was that it seemed to undermine IBE, and to some extent abductive
reasoning generally, even if scientists were granted the considerable inductive
powers required to comparatively evaluate explanatory hypotheses in a reliable
manner.
Another rejoinder to Lipton’s response starts by noting that there is a per-
fectly good sense in which scientists may be reliable at comparative evaluations
of theories even when their background theories are generally false.41 By way
of analogy, consider how a skilled logician may reliably accept only those con-
clusions that follow deductively from premises they also accept. Of course, the
premises from which the logician deduces their conclusions may be false; still,
there is a perfectly good sense in which the logician’s inferences are reliable
relative to the premises they accept. Similarly, scientists using IBE can be said
to be reliable at making comparative evaluations to the extent that their eval-
uations reflect the weight of evidence for and against each hypothesis relative
to the background theories they accept. If the background theories accepted
by some scientists are false, then the relevant scientists may well be misled
into ranking a false theory ahead of a true one. But this is no different from a
logician who competently derives a false conclusion from false premises via
a deductively valid argument. In both cases, there is a perfectly good sense in
which the inference itself can be said to be reliable relative to the premises or
background theories with which they started.
In light of this point, one can – contra Lipton – grant scientists consider-
able inductive powers regarding their reliability in comparatively evaluating
explanatory hypotheses in stage (ii), and still maintain that we have little reason
to think they are reliable at generating true explanatory hypotheses in stage (i).
On this view, the relevant type of reliability is relative to the background theo-
ries on which they largely base their evaluations: if these theories are generally
41 See Dellsén (2017c, 35–36) for a more detailed consideration of two possible senses in which
scientists’ comparative evaluations may be said to be reliable, and how this affects Lipton’s
argument.
true, then scientists will reliably rank true theories above false ones; if their
background theories are generally false, they may well fail to do so in many or
most cases. To illustrate with a concrete case, consider that in the early nine-
teenth century, Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift was rejected in
favor of a theory on which the continents had fixed locations, partly because
the geophysical theories that were accepted at the time strongly indicated that it
would be impossible for the continents to move around as rapidly as Wegener’s
theory predicted. There is a perfectly good sense in which a reliable ranking of
the two theories places the fixed-continents theory above Wegener’s theory rel-
ative to such background theories. In that same sense, reliable rankers of the
two theories would then reverse the ranking in the late 1950s, when the relevant
geophysical theories had been overturned so as to allow for much more rapid
movements of the tectonic plates which had then been discovered to undergird
continental drift (Bowler and Morus, 2005, 237–252).
Although other reactionary responses to the bad lot objection have been
developed and defended,42 let us now move on to consider revisionary
responses instead. The most concessive sort of revisionary response would hold
that since we have formulated only a limited range of explanatory hypothe-
ses, the conclusion of an abductive inference can at most be that one of these
hypotheses is epistemically superior to the other hypotheses that have been
formulated so far. Put differently, abductive reasoning would not really war-
rant inferring that any explanatory hypothesis is true (or even probably and/or
approximately true); only that a hypothesis is superior to the other hypotheses
that have been formulated at a given time. For example, Kuipers (2000) devel-
ops an inferential account of abductive reasoning on which the conclusion of

such reasoning is only that a given hypothesis is closer to the truth (i.e., more
truthlike) than its available competitors. In a similar vein, Dellsén (2018) argues
that in many circumstances abductive reasoning only warrants inferring that a
given hypothesis is more likely to be true than its available competitors, but
that this generally suffices for reasonably accepting it as a working hypothesis
in one’s subsequent investigations.43
However, these revisionary responses – by themselves – may well concede
too much to the bad lot objection, for there are surely some cases in which
42 See Lipton (1993, 94–96), Schupbach (2014), and Shaffer (2021). For rejoinders to some of
these responses, see Wray (2008), Khalifa (2010), and Dellsén (2017c).
43 For similar reasons, various authors have argued that the attitude we should take towards an
explanatory hypothesis we end up with should not be one of belief at all – not even belief that
the hypothesis is probably and/or approximately true. Rather, according to these authors, we
should end up tentatively accepting or pursuing the hypothesis in our future research (Kapitan,
1992; Dawes, 2013; Nyrup, 2015; Cabrera, 2017; although see also Henderson, 2022).
abductive reasoning can be used to establish not merely the comparative

conclusion that a given hypothesis is closer to the truth, or more likely to be
true, than its competitors, but also the absolute conclusion that the hypothesis
is close to the truth or probably true. After all, we often rely on the proba-
ble and/or approximate truth of various theories for certain purposes, such as
in predictions and explanations, and merely knowing that a theory is better
than currently available competitors is often not good enough for such pur-
poses. For example, the major policy recommendations that are grounded in
the theory of anthropogenic global warming (i.e., the claim that human activ-
ities are a significant causal factor in global temperature increases since the
industrial revolution) are evidently not based on the (comparative) conclusion
that this theory is epistemically superior to its available competitors. Rather, it
is based on the (absolute) conviction that this theory is almost certainly true,
or at least sufficiently close to the truth so as to warrant the relevant policy
recommendations.
To deal with this concern, some philosophers have suggested that IBE should
be modified so as to include an additional clause requiring that the inferred
explanatory hypothesis not only be better than available competitors, but also
“good enough” (e.g., Musgrave, 1988; Lipton, 2004). In other words, these
philosophers suggest that IBE should be taken to involve not just a comparative
evaluation in which some set of available hypotheses are compared to each
other in terms of their explanatory goodness, but also an absolute evaluation
of whether the best of these hypotheses is a sufficiently good explanation to
be inferred at all. This is supposed to address the bad lot objection because in
situations where none of the available explanatory hypotheses are true, even
the best available explanatory hypotheses might be thought to be insufficiently
good to be inferred by this criterion.
One issue with this response is that it is far from clear what the above authors
mean when they say that an explanation must be “good enough.” The most
natural interpretation of the phrase is that the inferred hypothesis must exceed
some designated threshold of explanatory goodness, where “explanatory good-
ness” is understood in absolute rather than merely comparative terms. On this
view, each hypothesis is associated with some level of explanatory goodness
relative to the evidence at a given time, and whether the hypothesis counts as
providing a “good enough” explanation simply depends on whether that level
exceeds a threshold. However, Dellsén (2021, 161–164) argues that adding
such a clause to IBE leads to various new problems, and is anyway ill-suited to
address the original bad lot objection. Consider, for example, the many cases in
which scientists have accepted some explanatory hypothesis at an earlier time,
only to later reject it in favor of a newly-formulated alternative that provides an
even better explanation of the relevant evidence (Sklar, 1981; Stanford, 2006).
In such cases, the scientists must have assumed that even the earlier hypothe-
sis exceeded the threshold for explanatory goodness – otherwise, they would
hardly have accepted it – and yet the relevant hypothesis turned out to be
false by our current lights. So, in these cases, having a hypothesis that exceeds
the threshold for explanatory goodness evidently did prevent scientists from
inferring from a “bad lot” of explanatory hypotheses.
In view of such problems, Dellsén (2021, 164–172) develops a quite differ-
ent account of when, and why, the best available explanatory hypothesis can be
considered “good enough” to be inferred. In short, the best available explana-
tory hypothesis can be inferred when it has been through a temporally extended
process which Dellsén calls explanatory consolidation. This process consists
in the accumulation of two quite different types of information which gradu-
ally make it more plausible that the hypothesis one tentatively accepts indeed
provides a better explanation of one’s evidence than any other hypothesis that
could be formulated. Specifically, as empirical evidence for the hypothesis
accumulates, it gradually increases the plausibility that no alternative to it could
explain all that evidence in an equally satisfactory manner. In addition, repeated
unsuccessful attempts to formulate alternative hypotheses that provide better
explanations also increase the plausibility that the tentatively accepted hypoth-
esis cannot be matched in that regard (Dawid et al., 2015; Dellsén, 2017d). If
all goes well, then eventually we will have accumulated enough information
of these two types so as to make it exceedingly plausible that the hypothesis in
question is “good enough” to be inferred.
4.2 The Dynamic Dutch Book Argument

Thus far we have considered an objection to abductive reasoning, the bad lot
objection, which primarily targets inferential accounts, such as Harman’s and
Lipton’s IBE. Recall from Section 2 that van Fraassen takes this objection to
motivate a move away from inferential accounts towards a certain sort of prob-
abilistic account, but that van Fraassen goes on to argue that this probabilistic
account should be rejected as well. In this section, we will take a closer look
at this second argument of van Fraassen’s, and consider some recent responses
to it.
Recall that van Fraassen argues that in order for abductive reasoning to have
a place within Bayesianism, the hypothesis that best explains some evidence
E must be awarded greater personal probability than the Bayesian framework
would, by itself, confer on the hypothesis. In particular, van Fraassen suggests
that this would require a modification of Bayesian Conditionalization such that
a bonus is added to the posterior probability an agent assigns to the hypothesis

that provides the best explanation of the newly obtained evidence. In Section 2,
we called this general idea Abductive Conditionalization, and noted that a sim-
ple version of it would require agents to set their new probability in a hypothesis
H to Pr′(H) = Pr(H|E) + b, where b is the bonus probability awarded to H for
best explaining E. Note that if H is awarded a bonus in this way, then at least
some rival hypotheses must receive a penalty so as to balance the total prob-
ability awarded to H and its mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive rivals
(more on this below).
Van Fraassen’s (1989, 160–170) objection to Abductive Conditionalization
is, in brief, that because it conflicts with Bayesian Conditionalization in assign-
ing a bonus to some hypotheses that wouldn’t receive it according to Bayesian
Conditionalization, it is undermined by any positive argument in favor of the
latter. In particular, van Fraassen appeals to the so-called dynamic Dutch book
argument in favor of Bayesian Conditionalization. In a nutshell, this argument
says that any agent who updates their personal probabilities when they receive
new evidence via any rule that conflicts with Bayesian Conditionalization will
be such that, if someone (a “Dutch bookie”) were to offer them a particular
series of monetary bets at different times that are all fair by the agent’s lights at
each time,44 then the agent would be guaranteed to lose money no matter what
the outcomes of the bets would be. Indeed, the agent would be able to know
all this beforehand – that by following the alternative rule for how to update
their probabilities (e.g., Abductive Conditionalization) they can only end up
losing money on bets they consider fair when the bets are offered. According
to van Fraassen, this indicates that the agent is guilty of a kind of irration-
ality over time, often referred to as diachronic incoherence. Since Abductive
Conditionalization clearly conflicts with Bayesian Conditionalization by virtue
of adding a bonus probability to some hypotheses (and having others incur a
corresponding penalty), Abductive Conditionalization would necessarily be an
irrational way to update one’s credences in light of new evidence, according to
van Fraassen.45
As noted in Section 2, many proponents of probabilistic accounts of abduc-
tive reasoning agree with van Fraassen that it would be a bad idea to assign
bonus probabilities to the best explaining hypotheses in the way suggested
44 A “fair” bet is one that has an expected value of zero given the agent’s personal probabilities,
that is, roughly such that the agent can expect to break even in the long run if she repeatedly
made the same bet.
45 See also Pettigrew (2021) for a version of this argument that doesn’t appeal to rational betting
behavior, but instead argues that using Bayesian Conditionalization (rather than Abductive
Conditionalization) maximizes the expected accuracy of one’s credences.
by Abductive Conditionalization. They instead argue that explanatory con-

siderations should play some other role in the assignment of probabilities to
hypotheses (see §2.3). With that said, however, one of the more influential pro-
ponents of abductive reasoning, Igor Douven, has put up a vigorous defense
of Abductive Conditionalization in a number of recent publications (e.g., Dou-
ven, 2013, 2017, 2022; Douven and Wenmackers, 2017). In particular, Douven
formulates a version of Abductive Conditionalization in which the bonus prob-
ability added to the hypothesis that best explains the evidence is balanced out
by a general penalty to all other hypotheses. With some slight simplifications,
this rule can be formulated as follows (see Douven, 2022, 51):
EXPL: Let H = {H1, ..., Hn } be a set of mutually exclusive and jointly exhaus-
tive hypotheses, and let f be a function that assigns a positive value b to the
hypothesis in H that best explains E, and 0 to all other hypotheses therein.46
Then an abductive reasoner should update their credence in any hypothesis
Hj by setting:
Pr(Hj ) Pr(E|Hj ) + f (Hj, E, H)

Pr′(Hj ) = ∑n
k=1 (Pr(Hk ) Pr(E|Hk ) + f (Hk, E, H))
Although EXPL may seem complicated, the intuitive thought behind it is quite
simple: The hypothesis in H that best explains E gets a bonus probability, and
all other hypotheses in H are penalized in proportion to how probable they
would have been without these penalties.
The crux of Douven’s defense of EXPL (and to some extent Abductive Con-
ditionalization in general) is that even if EXPL would render one vulnerable

to a guaranteed loss in the situations described in the dynamic Dutch book
argument, it does not follow that using EXPL rather than Bayesian Condition-
alization is irrational all things considered. Rather, vulnerability to dynamic
Dutch books may just be a small downside to EXPL which may be outweighed
by other considerations that count in its favor and against Bayesian Condition-
alization. In support of this, one might point out that the situations described
in the dynamic Dutch book argument are extremely rare, so the sort of irra-
tionality that the argument supposedly brings out in agents updating by EXPL
might be thought to be relatively harmless. Thus, if there are important benefits
46 Formally, the function f is characterized as follows:

{
b if Hj best explains E
f (Hj , E, H) =
0 otherwise
to using EXPL rather than Bayesian Conditionalization, then vulnerability to

dynamic Dutch books may well be a small price to pay, all things considered.
Douven (2022, ch. 4) argues that there are indeed such benefits to using
EXPL rather than good old Bayesian Conditionalization. Douven shows that,
in various computer simulations in which artificial agents are attempting to
discover a coin’s bias by flipping it repeatedly, agents who use EXPL tend to
converge on true hypotheses much faster than those who use Bayesian Condi-
tionalization. Here, “convergence” is a matter of assigning a probability above
a high threshold, for example 0.9 or 0.99. So, according to Douven, users of
EXPL will be in a position to accept or assert true hypotheses more quickly,
and more often, than those who simply use Bayesian Conditionalization – at
least if a hypothesis’ acceptability and/or assertability is a matter of it having a
high probability (see, e.g., Foley, 1992; Douven, 2006). As Douven acknowl-
edges, however, EXPL also tends to lead agents to assign higher probabilities
to false hypotheses more often than Bayesian Conditionalization. Overall, then,
one might say that EXPL is simply riskier than Bayesian Conditionalization,
but that the risk may often be worth taking.
Apart from defending EXPL against van Fraassen’s Dutch book argument
in this way, Douven (2022, chs. 6–7) also gives a related positive argument for
EXPL which appeals to the notion of ecological rationality (Gigerenzer, 2000).
The idea, roughly, is that how it is rational for someone to behave – or, in this
case, how it is rational for them to update their personal probabilities – may
depend not only on facts about the agent’s psychology but also on facts about
the environment or situation they find themselves in. Douven again appeals to
computer simulations to suggest that from this perspective it may be better to

use EXPL than other updating rules, including Bayesian Conditionalization, in
a variety of circumstances – including situations in which agents update not
only on ordinary empirical evidence but also on the opinions of their peers (see
also Douven and Wenmackers, 2017).
A possible limitation of Douven’s approach concerns whether EXPL can
be extended beyond the simple coin tossing cases in this simulations. As for-
mulated above, EXPL gives a probability bonus to the hypothesis that best
explains the evidence, but nothing is said explicitly about what counts as “best
explaining.” In Douven’s coin tossing simulations, the “best explainer” is sim-
ply the available hypothesis that comes closest to postulating a bias that exactly
matches the observed frequency thus far. For example, if the available hypothe-
ses posit biases at 10% intervals (0%, 10%, 20%, etc.), and 681 out of 1,000
tosses have landed heads thus far, then the “best explainer” is the hypothesis
that the coin is 70% biased in favor of heads (Douven, 2013, 432). This is clear
enough for hypotheses about how a coin is biased, but what about more realistic
cases in which either the evidence or the hypotheses – or indeed both – do not
themselves concern probabilistic quantities like frequencies or chances that can
be so easily compared quantitively?
In such cases, EXPL will need to appeal to some other criteria for what
counts as the “best explainer” among available hypotheses, such as explana-
tory virtues like scope and simplicity. However, it remains to be seen whether
EXPL, when coupled with such criteria for what counts as the best explana-
tion, would indeed have the epistemic benefits Douven argues it has in simple
coin tossing situations. Furthermore, EXPL may have more serious epistemic
drawbacks in more realistic cases than in coin tossing situations, because in
such cases there may not be enough obtainable evidence to turn around assign-
ments of high probabilities to false hypotheses. After all, working scientists are
not often in a situation in which they can simply toss a coin to obtain more evi-
dence pertinent to a given hypothesis; rather, they often have to design and run
entirely new experiments, or engage in laborious field-work, in order to collect
any new evidence worth speaking of.
4.3 Recent Challenges to Abductive Reasoning

Van Fraassen’s two challenges to the rationality of abductive reasoning, the bad
lot objection and the dynamic Dutch book argument, are without question the
most influential problems of this sort in the literature. In recent years, however,
abductive reasoning has been challenged in other ways as well. In this final
section, we will briefly look at some of these more recent challenges and how
proponents of various accounts of abductive reasoning might respond.
4.3.1 The Screening-Off Challenge

One recent challenge concerns the issue of whether there is a role for abductive
reasoning within Bayesianism. As we have seen, most proponents of proba-
bilistic and hybrid accounts of abductive reasoning argue, in different ways,
that abductive reasoning is not only compatible with, but indeed complements,
the Bayesian approach to scientific reasoning. This contention is called into
question by William Roche and Elliott Sober’s screening-off challenge.
Roche and Sober (2013) suggest that in order for explanatory considerations
to count as evidentially relevant within the Bayesian approach, the fact that
some hypothesis H explains some evidence E – call that fact X (for eXpla-
nation) – must raise the probability of H more than E would do all by itself:
Pr(H|E&X) > Pr(H|E). Conversely, according to Roche and Sober, explana-
tory considerations would be evidentially irrelevant if Pr(H|E&X) = Pr(H|E) –
that is, if E “screens off ” H from X. In support of this criterion, Roche and
Sober point out that if conditionalizing on X does not raise or otherwise alter
the probability of H given E in this way, then there is apparently no need for
the Bayesian to appeal to explanatory considerations in spelling out how much
some evidence confirms some hypothesis. Any probability added by the discov-
ery of X (i.e., the fact that H explains E) has already been taken into account
when E raised the probability of H. Roche and Sober then go on to argue, with
the use of a suggestive case study, that the equality Pr(H|E&X ) = Pr(H|E)
does indeed hold.
Roche and Sober’s argument has led to a flurry of responses. One response
disputes that the equality Pr(H|E&X) = Pr(H|E) holds either in Roche and
Sober’s own case study or in other similar cases of abductive reasoning (Cli-
menhaga, 2017a; see also Roche and Sober, 2017). A much more common set
of responses challenge the idea that Roche and Sober’s screening-off criterion,
Pr(H|E&X ) = Pr(H|E), is an appropriate criterion for evidential irrelevance.
For example, McCain and Poston (2014) argue that explanatory considerations
are evidentially relevant in that they affect how resilient one’s personal prob-
abilities are to being changed when new evidence is obtained (see also Roche
and Sober, 2014; McCain and Poston, 2018).47
Indeed, looking back at the accounts of abductive reasoning surveyed in
Section 2, including the various probabilistic accounts thereof, it is not clear
whether or how Roche and Sober’s screening-off challenge undermines any
of these accounts – even though each such account is surely spelling out
a sense in which explanation would be evidentially relevant. For example,
Pr(H|E&X) = Pr(H|E) is consistent with the central idea behind constraining
probabilistic accounts, according to which explanatory considerations go into

determining the value one should assign to Pr(H|E) in the first place – and per-
haps therefore also to Pr(H|E&X). On these accounts, had H not explained E,
then the value one should assign to Pr(H|E) – and thus, perhaps, to Pr(H|E&X)
as well – would have been lower than it actually is. That is surely an important
sense in which explanation is evidentially relevant, but it is perfectly consistent
with Pr(H|E&X) = Pr(H|E).48
47 For another argument that explanatory considerations might be evidentially relevant in other
ways, see Lange (2017); see also Roche and Sober (2019) and Lange (2020, 2023).
48 In response to this criticism, Roche and Sober might reply that they only meant to suggest
that there is a sense in which explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant, and that the screening-
off criterion captures this sense (Roche and Sober, 2017, 582n1). But this invites the follow-
up objection that Roche and Sober’s criterion is so divorced from the accounts of abductive
reasoning in the literature that their screening-off challenge fails to undermine any of these
accounts. In order for Roche and Sober’s argument to hit home, they would need to show
that the screening-off criterion of explanatory irrelevance has been, or should be, accepted by
proponents of abductive reasoning.
4.3.2 The Problem of Multiple Plausible Rivals

Another recent challenge to abductive reasoning concerns the fact that in many
accounts of abductive reasoning, one infers or probabilistically prefers only the
hypothesis that provides the very best explanation of the evidence, even though
there may be many quite plausible competing hypotheses that provide nearly as
good explanations. Dellsén (2017a) calls this the problem of multiple rivals.49
Consider situations in which there are multiple available explanatory
hypotheses, H1, . . . , Hn , each of which provides what is intuitively a fairly
good explanation of the evidence E as compared to the hypothesis Hi that
best explains E. In cases of this sort, the sheer number of plausible alterna-
tive hypotheses to Hi would seem to undermine the rationality of inferring, via
IBE or any similar inferential or hybrid account of abductive reasoning, that
Hi is indeed true.50 Consider, for example, that the best explanation for the
origin of life on Earth is arguably the so-called RNA world hypothesis, accord-
ing to which life began with the formation of self-replicating RNA molecules.
However, there are several other plausible alternative explanations, most of
which claim that life began with the formation of some nucleic acid or other –
although they disagree about which type of nucleic acid (PNA, TNA, or GNA).
Here, the availability of so many plausible rival explanatory hypotheses seem to
undermine any inference to one of these hypotheses, including the RNA world
hypothesis.
How should advocates of abductive reasoning respond to this problem?51
Dellsén (2017a, 24–28) suggests that proponents of inferential and hybrid
accounts, such as IBE, may deal with this problem by moving to a generali-
zation of IBE that he calls abductively robust inference (ARI). The basic idea
appeals to the fact that a claim C may be entailed by several of the hypothe-
ses that provide some of the best explanations of the evidence, so that if any
of these hypotheses is true (regardless of which of one), C would be true. A
bit more precisely, suppose C is entailed by all of the k hypotheses that pro-
vide the best k explanations of the evidence, where k is some natural number
(less than or possibly equal to the number of available hypotheses n). For a
49 McCain and Poston (2019) discuss a closely related challenge, which they dub the disjunction
objection, and which they attribute to brief remarks made by van Fraassen (1989) and Fumerton
(1995).
50 Indeed, it would also seem to undermine the rationality of assigning a higher probability only
to Hi , and therefore assigning lower probabilities to at least some of its rival hypotheses, as per
Douven’s EXPL (see §4.2).
51 McCain and Poston (2019) suggest that their version of the problem, that is the disjunction
objection, can be avoided by adding a clause to IBE requiring that the best explanation must
also be “good enough.” Dellsén (2017a, 24) anticipates this type of response and argues that it
doesn’t work as a solution to the problem of plausible rivals.
large enough k, C may then be confidently inferred even if none of the avail-
able explanatory hypotheses H1, . . . , Hn – including the very best explanatory
hypothesis Hi . After all, each one of H1, . . . , Hn would be subject to the prob-
lem of multiple rivals, whereas C would not be subject to any such problem; on
the contrary, the multiplicity of plausible rivals all of which entail C arguably
strengthens the support for C, for it shows that C is “robust” across the var-
ious explanatory possibilities described by each rival hypothesis (Woodward,
2006). Returning to our example of hypotheses about the origin of life, note
that the four best alternative explanations for the origin of life all posit that life
began with the formation of some type of nucleic acid – be it RNA, PNA, TNA,
or GNA (i.e., by an xNA). According to the version of ARI where k = 4, we
can thus confidently infer this “robust” result can be inferred.
A fair complaint about ARI is that it is underspecified in some important
respects. Indeed, Dellsén (2017a, 26) emphasizes that ARI is not in fact an
inference rule at all, but a pattern of multiple such rules for different values
of k. Setting a higher value to k will generally make the resulting inference
rule epistemically safer, in that one will be less likely to infer something false,
but also less powerful, in that the inferred claim C will generally have to be a
logically weaker proposition. Since one may want to balance safety and power
differently in different circumstances, for example depending on how much
is at stake, different instantiations of ARI (i.e., different values for k) may be
appropriate in different circumstances. In this respect, ARI should arguably be
left unspecified so that it instead preserves the flexibility required to balance
safety and power in different ways.52 With that said, there are other aspects
of ARI that arguably need to be spelled out in greater detail. For example, in
some cases one might want to allow an inference to a claim C that is merely
entailed by most – rather than all – of the k hypotheses that provide the best
explanations of the evidence. Furthermore, in those cases, it surely also matters
how good an explanation is provided by each of the hypotheses that entail C.
More work is needed to flesh out ARI along these dimensions.
4.3.3 Incoherence Across Explanatory Levels

A third and final recent challenge to abductive reasoning concerns the fact that
a given phenomenon can often be explained at multiple “levels.” Climenhaga
(2017b) argues that this makes some influential accounts of abductive reasoning
incoherent, in that these accounts will imply that agents should make inferences
or probability assignments that are incompatible with one another.
52 It is worth noting that when we set k = 1, we get an inference rule that is extensionally
equivalent to IBE. It is in this sense that ARI is a generalization of IBE (Dellsén, 2017a, 27).
Consider, in particular, a standard version of IBE which holds that one may
infer a hypothesis just in case it provides a better explanation of one’s evidence
than any other competing hypothesis. Now, at least in some cases, it seems that
this idea implies that one can infer several different hypotheses from the same
evidence, because the evidence can be explained at different “levels” such that
the inferred hypotheses do not compete with each other but only with other
hypotheses at the same “level.” In particular, suppose that, at one “level” of
explanation, Ha provides the best explanation of some evidence E; while at
another “level,” Hb provides the best explanation; and yet Ha and Hb are incom-
patible propositions. If such cases are possible, the upshot seems to be that IBE,
at least as it is standardly formulated, recommends inferring two incompatible
propositions, Ha and Hb .
Climenhaga (2017b, 253–254) demonstrates that such cases are possible by
considering a rather artificial setup involving several urns containing differently
colored balls and coin flips that determine which of these an agent randomly
chooses balls from. To see the relevance of Climenhaga’s problem to scientific
practice, let us examine a more realistic case instead. Consider the fact that both
birds and Pterygota (i.e., flying insects) are able to fly. Why is that? At a certain
abstract level of explanation, there are two relevant explanatory hypotheses
to consider, namely that the ability to fly is a trait inherited from a common
flying ancestor, on the one hand, and that it isn’t, on the other. The latter type
of explanation – that the ability to fly was not present in the common ancestor of
birds and Pterygota and instead evolved independently in the lineage of each –
would be an instance of what evolutionary biologists call convergent evolution.
We thus have the following two explanatory hypotheses:
(I) Flight evolved convergently in birds and Pterygota.

(II) Birds and Pterygota share a common flying ancestor.
So which explanation is better, (I) or (II)? When considered at this level of

abstraction, it’s plausible that (II) would provide the better explanation, at least
all other things being equal. To see why, note that (II) would require only a sin-
gle mutation (or, perhaps more plausibly, a single series of mutations) to have
occurred from a nonflying species to a flying species, namely one that occurred
before the lineage of birds and Pterygota split into different branches. By con-
trast, (I) would require two mutations (or two unrelated series of mutations),
one in the lineage between the common ancestor and birds and another between
the common ancestor and Pterygota. There is thus a clear sense in which (II) is
more parsimonious. Perhaps relatedly, it seems considerably more likely that
random events such as the particular type of mutation required to obtain the
ability to fly would happen only once rather than twice.53 Assuming that being
the best explanation has something to do with being more parsimonious and/or
conferring greater probability on the evidence, this might lead us to conclude
that (II) rather than (I) should be inferred via IBE.
However, we may also consider this issue from the point of view of some-
what more detailed explanatory hypotheses. In particular, let us suppose that
we are interested in learning not only about whether birds and Pterygota share a
common flying ancestor, but also when (if at all) there were evolutionary pres-
sures to evolve the ability to fly. So consider the following four explanatory
hypotheses concerning how exactly birds and Pterygota evolved which take a
stand on this issue as well:
(1) Flight evolved convergently in birds and Pterygota, and there were similar
evolutionary pressures favoring flight in the lineages of both.
(2) Flight evolved convergently in birds and Pterygota, and there were dissim-
ilar evolutionary pressures favoring flight in the lineage of each.
(3) Birds and Pterygota share a common flying ancestor, and there were similar
evolutionary pressures favoring flight in the lineages of both.
(4) Birds and Pterygota share a common flying ancestor, and there were
dissimilar evolutionary pressures favoring flight in the lineage of each.
Given this partition of the explanatory hypotheses, one could very well argue
that the best explanation is (1). After all, if there were indeed similar evo-
lutionary pressures favoring flight among the ancestors of birds and insects
respectively, then one should expect flight to evolve in both lineages independ-
ently (i.e., convergently). Indeed, (1) is the hypothesis that is generally accepted
in contemporary evolutionary biology, for various reasons that need not con-
cern us here. So let’s suppose – if only for the sake of the argument – that out
of (1)–(4), (1) should be inferred via IBE.
The problem now is that the two explanations that we have concluded should
both be inferred via IBE from the same fact are logically incompatible. If flight
evolved convergently, as per (1), then birds and Pterygota do not share a com-
mon ancestor, contrary to (II). Apparently, then, IBE warrants inferences to
logically incompatible claims. One could of course maintain that there is noth-
ing wrong with accepting incompatible claims in some cases – as when one
accepts both general relativity and quantum mechanics despite the apparent
incompatibility between these theories – and that this would just be another
case of that sort. However, all other things being equal, it is arguably at least a
53 This is a point nicely made by Sober (1994), whose discussion of similar cases from
evolutionary biology is my inspiration for this example.
downside to IBE if it leads so easily to incompatible conclusions. Furthermore,

this concession would seem to conflict with scientific practice, such as in the
case above, because evolutionary biologists do not generally accept both (1)
and (II); rather, they accept only (1).
A potential solution to Climenhaga’s problem starts from noting that there
is an important asymmetry between the two sets of competing explanations
listed above. The hypotheses in the first set, (I)–(II), are strictly less informative
than the hypotheses in the second set, (1)–(4). After all, each hypothesis in the
second set entails a hypothesis in the first but not vice versa. For instance, (1)
entails (I) but (I) does not entail (1). Indeed, (I) is equivalent to the disjunction
of (1) and (2), while (II) is in turn equivalent to the disjunction of (3) and (4). So,
from the point of view of those who advance (1)–(4), (I) and (II) are incomplete
explanations: They fail to take a stand on the arguably crucial issue of whether
there were similar or dissimilar evolutionary pressures that led to flight in both
birds and Pterygota. No similar charge can be levelled at (1)–(4) from the point
of view of those who advance (I) and (II), since there is no issue on which latter,
but not the former, take a stand.
Based on these considerations, one might then suggest that there is a privi-
leged “level” of explanation on which IBE should be taken to operate – at least
in the type of cases that lead to incompatible claims being inferred via IBE.
In short, the privileged “level” is that at which the set of hypotheses provide
more informative explanations. In the choice between the two sets of hypothe-
ses considered above, IBE should therefore operate on (1)–(4), and so arguably
warrant inferring (1). And since (1) entails (I), there is a sense in which (I) can
also be inferred via IBE, albeit indirectly. After all, anyone who is in a position
to infer (1) is also clearly in a position to infer an immediate logical conse-
quence thereof, namely (II). Dellsén (2016) refers to this variation on standard
IBE as indirect IBE, and suggests that in it one infers a hypothesis H in virtue
of H being entailed by a stronger hypothesis H* that explains E better than any
competing explanatory hypothesis.54 The point, then, is not that no hypothesis
from the set (I)–(II) can be inferred via IBE, but rather that (I) rather than (II)
should be inferred because (I) is, whereas (II) is not, part of the best complete
explanation, namely (1).
54 Indeed, Dellsén (2016, 224) argues that it is common among proponents of IBE to implicitly
count these types of inferences as instances of IBE. For example, Harman (1965, 90–91) sug-
gests that, from the fact that all observed As have been Bs, one may infer that the next observed
A will be also be a B. However, the next observed A being B clearly does not explain why all
observed As have been Bs; rather, what explains the latter is (on Harman’s view) that all As
are Bs, from which one can then deduce that the next observed A will be a B (see also Lipton,
2004, 63–64).
Conclusion
Where does all of this leave us? I hope it’s clear at this point that both the
general term “abductive reasoning,” and the popular slogan “Inference to the
Best Explanation,” tend to mean different things to different philosophers.
Often prompted by various challenges to the cogency of abductive reasoning,
these philosophers have responded by clarifying, refining, or developing their
accounts of abductive reasoning so as to meet these challenges. Throughout
this Element, I have often indicated my favored approach to meeting each chal-
lenge, but only in a piecemeal manner. In this brief final section, I wish to sketch
a more holistic picture of how the pieces hang together in my view.
As discussed in Section 2, a crucial issue is whether one’s account takes
abductive reasoning to be inferential, probabilistic, or some hybrid of both. As
I indicated already in that section, I favor a version of the third type of account,
on which a form of abductive inference serves as a heuristic for rational proba-
bility assignments in which a preference for better explaining theories emerges
naturally (see §2.4). In my view, this heuristic account of abductive reason-
ing provides us with “the best of both worlds,” in that we can draw upon the
powerful probabilistic machinery of the Bayesian framework to account for
ideally rational reasoning in science, while still preserving a place for a the
type of comparative explanatory evaluation that seems to make up much of
the actual reasoning that goes on in science. Of course, in combining elements
from inferential and probabilistic accounts, this heuristic account opens itself
up to the challenges facing both. In my view, however, these challenges can be
met.
The most important challenge to probabilistic accounts is arguably the

dynamic Dutch book argument (see §4.2). However, this argument only applies
to probabilistic accounts that involve some alternative updating rule to Bayes-
ian Conditionalization, such as what I have called Abductive Conditionaliza-
tion. In my view, however, the kinds of probabilistic accounts to which the
heuristic account should appeal are not committed to Abductive Condition-
alization, and instead either claim that preferences for hypotheses that better
explain emerge from the probabilistic machinery given assumptions about the
natural distribution of prior probabilities, or that explanatory considerations
constrain which initial probability assignments are rational (see §2.3). These
accounts are also not vulnerable to any form of the screening-off challenge,
since neither type of account holds that abductive reasoning works by updating
on a specific explanatory proposition that the rest of our evidence “screens off ”
(see §4.3.1). Thus if the heuristic account is coupled with probabilistic accounts
of these “emergent” or “constraining” varieties, then I see little reason to worry

about these challenges.
The most prominent challenge to inferential accounts is the bad lot objec-
tion (see §4.1). In my view, that challenge cannot be met within the confines of
Harman’s (1965) original notion of Inference to the Best Explanation, or Lip-
ton’s (2004) influential development thereof. Accordingly, I believe we need
a more sophisticated account of the type of inference involved in abductive
reasoning on the heuristic account thereof. Specifically, we should acknowl-
edge, firstly, that the process of abductive reasoning is rarely complete once a
hypothesis has been identified as the one which provides the best explanation
of those that have been generated. Although such a hypothesis may be tenta-
tively adopted as a working hypothesis, we often want – and sometimes need –
greater assurance that this hypothesis is not merely the best we have thought of
so far, but also quite likely true (or approximately so). In those cases, I have
suggested that scientists ought to – and normally do – go through a process of
explanatory consolidation, in which accumulating evidence and failed attempts
to formulate better alternatives gradually make the hypothesis more plausible
(see §4.1). Secondly, we should also acknowledge that abductive reasoning
need not always warrant inferring the entirety of the hypothesis that provides
the best explanation of the evidence. In some cases – especially when there are
multiple plausible rival explanations on the table – abductive reasoning may
only warrant inferring a weaker claim that is entailed not only by the very best
explanation, but also by some or all of the other reasonably good explanations
that are available (see §4.3.2).
Apart from the various challenges that face inferential, probabilistic, and
hybrid accounts, there is also the more general challenge of why we should pre-
fer “better explanations” at all. For example, why prefer theories that explain
more to those that explain less, or more parsimonious theories to complex ones?
As discussed in Section 3, philosophers are divided roughly between realists
about explanatory goodness, who hold that better explanations are more likely
to be true, and antirealists, who hold that better explanations are (at best) more
convenient to work with. Moreover, realists disagree amongst themselves on
whether providing better explanations can be shown a priori, or instead a poste-
riori, to be truth-conducive (see §3.2). My own position on this thorny issue is
that different approaches may be appropriate for different explanatory virtues,
and that at least some of the virtues – for example, parsimony – may be truth-
tracking in some contexts but not others. In my view, this is not a problem for
the heuristic account of abductive reasoning that I favor, since abductive rea-
soners can – and often do – choose not to appeal to the relevant virtues in the
contexts in which they fail to be truth-tracking (see §§3.3–3.4).
In summary, then, the overall account of abductive reasoning that I favor is

a combination of several complementary theses, the most central of which are
the following:
(i) For some explanatory virtues, such as scope, probabilistic preferences

for more virtuous theories emerge naturally in ideally rational Bayesian
reasoners whose prior probabilities satisfy plausible constraints.
(ii) For other explanatory virtues, such as parsimony, context determines the
extent to which theories that possess them are probabilistically preferred
or dispreferred by ideally rational Bayesian agents.
(iii) In either case, the extent to which an explanatory virtue is exhibited by a
theory can serve as a heuristic for approximating ideally rational Bayesian
reasoning in inferences that resemble Harman-style IBE.
(iv) However, Harman-style IBE can only serve as a reliable heuristic for prob-
abilistic comparisons between already-generated theories, since it is not
designed to ensure that the one of the generated theories is true.
(v) While this is sometimes an acceptable limitation to IBE, such as when our
aim is merely to choose which theory to pursue further, a stronger form
of IBE is needed to conclude that a theory is probably true.
(vi) This may largely be achieved by adding to IBE a final step, consisting of
a temporally extended process of gathering more evidence and exploring
alternative explanations, before accepting the relevant theory.
(vii) Furthermore, in cases where there are multiple plausible rivals to the best
explaining theory, the epistemic risk involved in IBE may be alleviated
by inferring only what all these theories agree on.
Taken together, these theses show how one can coherently and plausibly rec-
oncile the kernel of truth in traditional ideas about abductive reasoning –
stemming from such luminaries as Bacon, Darwin, Peirce, and Harman, among
many others – with the powerful and popular Bayesian approach to scientific
reasoning. The overall account may not be as simple as one might have hoped,
but then again there is little reason to think that scientific reasoning is a simple
matter.
References
Bacon, F. (1620). Novum Organum, sive Indicia Vera de Interpretatione
Naturae. John Bill, London.
Baker, A. (2003). Quantitative Parsimony and Explanatory Power. British
Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 54:245–259.
Baker, A. (2007). Occam’s Razor in Science: A Case Study from Biogeography.
Biology and Philosophy, 22:193–215.
Baker, A. (2022). Simplicity. In Zalta, E. N., editor, Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford
University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/simplicity/.
Barnes, E. (1995). Inference to the Loveliest Explanation. Synthese, 103:252–
277.
Beebe, J. R. (2009). The Abductivist Reply to Skepticism. Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, 79:605–636.
Biggs, S. and Wilson, J. M. (2017). The a Priority of Abduction. Philosophical
Studies, 174(3):735–758.
Bird, A. (2017). Inference to the Best Explanation, Bayesianism, and Knowl-
edge. In McCain, K. and Poston, T., editors, Best Explanations: New Essays
on Inference to the Best Explanation, pages 97–120. Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
Boghossian, P. (2014). What Is Inference? Philosophical Studies, 169(1):1–18.
Bowler, P. and Morus, I. R. (2005). Making Modern Science: A Historical
Survey. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Boyd, R. (1980). Scientific Realism and Naturalistic Epistemology. PSA: Pro-
ceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association,
1980:613–662.
Burgess, J. P. (1998). Occam’s Razor and Scientific Method. In Schirn, M.,
editor, The Philosophy of Mathematics Today, pages 195–214. Clarendon
Press, Oxford.
Cabrera, F. (2017). Can There Be a Bayesian Explanationism? On the Prospects
of a Productive Partnership. Synthese, 194:1245–1272.
Campos, D. G. (2011). On the Distinction between Peirce’s Abduction and
Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation. Synthese, 180:419–442.
Chakravartty, A. (2017). Scientific Realism. In Zalta, E. N., editor, The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition). Metaphysics Research
Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entr
ies/scientific-realism/.
References 67
Clarke, D. (1992). Descartes’ Philosophy of Science. Manchester University

Press, Manchester.
Climenhaga, N. (2017a). How Explanation Guides Confirmation. Philosophy
of Science, 84(2):359–368.
Climenhaga, N. (2017b). Inference to the Best Explanation Made Incoherent.
Journal of Philosophy, 114(5):251–273.
Crick, F. (1988). What Mad Pursuit. Basic Books, New York.
Crupi, V. (2021). Confirmation. In Zalta, E. N., editor, The Stanford Encyclope-
dia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stan-
ford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/confir
mation/.
Darwin, C. (1962). On the Origin of Species. Collier, New York.
Dawes, G. W. (2013). Belief Is Not the Issue: A Defense of Inference to the
Best Explanation. Ratio, 26:62–78.
Dawid, R., Hartmann, S., and Sprenger, J. (2015). The No Alternatives Argu-
ment. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 66:213–234.
Day, T. and Kincaid, H. (1994). Putting Inference to the Best Explanation in Its
Place. Synthese, 98:271–295.
Dellsén, F. (2016). Explanatory Rivals and the Ultimate Argument. Theoria,
82:217–237.
Dellsén, F. (2017a). Abductively Robust Inference. Analysis, 77:20–29.
Dellsén, F. (2017b). Certainty and Explanation in Descartes’ Philosophy of
Science. HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History
of Philosophy of Science, 7:302–327.
Dellsén, F. (2017c). Reactionary Responses to the Bad Lot Objection. Studies

in History and Philosophy of Science, 61:32–40.
Dellsén, F. (2017d). Realism and the Absence of Rivals. Synthese, 194:2427–
2446.
Dellsén, F. (2018). The Heuristic Conception of Inference to the Best Expla-
nation. Philosophical Studies, 175:1745–1766.
Dellsén, F. (2021). Explanatory Consolidation: From “Best” to “Good
Enough.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 103:157–177.
Descartes, R. (1985/1628). Rules for the Direction of the Mind. In Cottingham,
J., Stoothoff, R., and Murdoch, D., editors, The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, volume I, pages 7–78. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Descartes, R. (1985/1644). Principles of Philosophy. In Cottingham, J.,
Stoothoff, R., and Murdoch, D., editors, The Philosophical Writings of Des-
cartes, volume I, pages 177–291. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Dirac, P. A. M. (1931). Quantised Singularities in the Electromagnetic Field.
Proceedings of the Royal Society, 133:60–72.
68 References
Douven, I. (2006). Assertion, Knowledge, and Rational Credibility. Philosoph-

ical Review, 115:449–485.
Douven, I. (2013). Inference to the Best Explanation, Dutch Books, and
Inaccuracy Minimisation. Philosophical Quarterly, 63:428–444.
Douven, I. (2017). Inference to the Best Explanation: What Is It? And Why
Should We Care? In McCain, K. and Poston, T., editors, Best Explana-
tions: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation, pages 7–24. Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Douven, I. (2021). Abduction. In Zalta, E. N., editor, Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford
University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/abduction/.
Douven, I. (2022). The Art of Abduction. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Douven, I. and Wenmackers, S. (2017). Inference to the Best Explanation ver-
sus Bayes’s Rule in a Social Setting. British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science, 68:535–570.
Earman, J. (1992). Bayes or Bust: A Critical Examination of Bayesian Confir-
mation Theory. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Easwaran, K. (2011). Bayesianism II: Applications and Criticisms. Philosophy
Compass, 6:321–332.
Egg, M. (2016). Expanding Our Grasp: Causal Knowledge and the Problem
of Unconceived Alternatives. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science,
67:115–141.
Elliott, K. (2021). Inference to the Best Explanation and the New Size Elitism.
Philosophical Perspectives, 35:170–188.
Fisher, R. A. (1959). Smoking: The Cancer Controversy; Some Attempts to

Assess the Evidence. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh.
Foley, R. (1992). The Epistemology of Belief and the Epistemology of Degrees
of Belief. American Philosophical Quarterly, 29:111–124.
Foster, J. (1982). Induction, Explanation, and Natural Necessity. Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, 101:145–161.
Frege, G. (1979). Posthumous Writings. University of Chicago Press, Chi-
cago, IL.
Fumerton, R. (1995). Metaepistemology and Skepticism. Rowman & Lit-
tlefield, Lanham, MD.
Galileo, G. (1962/1632). Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief Worlds Systems.
University of Berkeley Press, Berkeley, CA.
Gigerenzer, G. (2000). Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World.
Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hanson, R. N. (1958). Patterns of Discovery. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
References 69
Harman, G. (1965). The Inference to the Best Explanation. The Philosophical

Review, 74:88–95.
Harman, G. (1989). Change in View: Principles of Reasoning. MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Harman, G. (1997). Pragmatism and Reasons for Belief. In Kulp, C. B., edi-
tor, Realism/Antirealism and Epistemology, pages 93–116. Rowman and
Littlefield, Lanham, MD.
Hempel, C. (1945). Studies in the Logic of Confirmation I & II. Mind, 54:1–26
& 97–121.
Hempel, C. G. (1966). Philosophy of Natural Science. Prentice-Hall, Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ.
Henderson, L. (2014). Bayesianism and Inference to the Best Explanation.
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 65:687–715.
Henderson, L. (2017). Bayesianism and IBE: The Case of Individual vs.
Group Selection. In McCain, K. and Poston, T., editors, Best Explanations:
New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation, pages 248–261. Oxford
Henderson, L. (2022). Putting Inference to the Best Explanation into Context.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 94:167–176.
Horwich, P. (1982). Probability and Evidence. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Huemer, M. (2009). Explanationist Aid for the Theory of Inductive Logic.
Jackson, E. and Tan, P. (2022). Epistemic Akrasia and Belief-Credence Dual-
ism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 104:717–727.

Jansson, L. and Tallant, J. (2017). Quantative Parsimony: Probably for the
Better. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 68:781–803.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New
York.
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A., editors (1982). Judgment under
Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge.
Kapitan, T. (1992). Peirce and the Autonomy of Abductive Reasoning. Erken-
ntnis, 37:1–26.
Kashyap, A. (2023). General Relativity, MOND, and the Problem of Uncon-
ceived Alternatives. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 13:30.
Keil, F. C. (2006). Explanation and Understanding. Annual Review of Psychol-
ogy, 57:227–254.
Khalifa, K. (2010). Default Privilege and Bad Lots: Underconsideration and
Explanatory Inference. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science,
24:91–105.
70 References
Kuhn, T. S. (1977). Objectivity, Value Judgments, and Theory Choice. In The

Essential Tension, pages 320–339. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Kuipers, T. (2000). From Instrumentalism to Constructive Empiricism.
Springer, Dordrecht.
Lange, M. (2017). The Evidential Relevance of Explanatoriness: A Reply to
Roche and Sober. Analysis, 77:303–312.
Lange, M. (2020). What Inference to the Best Explanation Is Not: A Response
to Roche and Sober’s Screening-Off Challenge to IBE. Teorema: Interna-
tional Journal of Philosophy, 39:27–42.
Lange, M. (2022). Putting Explanation Back Into “Inference to the Best
Explanation.” Noûs, 56:84–109.
Lange, M. (2023). A False Dichotomy in Denying Explanatoriness Any Role
in Confirmation. Noûs, forthcoming.
Laudan, L. (1984). Science and Values. University of California Press, Berke-
ley, CA.
Lavoisier, A. (1862). Oeuvres. Imprimerie Impériale, Paris.
Lewis, D. (1973). Counterfactuals. Blackwell, Oxford.
Lipton, P. (1991). Inference to the Best Explanation. Routledge, London.
Lipton, P. (1993). Is the Best Good Enough? Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, 93:89–104.
Lipton, P. (2001). Is Explanation a Guide to Inference? A Reply to Wes-
ley Salmon. In Hon, G. and Rakover, S., editors, Explanation: Theoretical
Approaches and Applications, pages 93–120. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht.
Lipton, P. (2004). Inference to the Best Explanation. Routledge, London, 2nd
edition.
Lombrozo, T. (2010). Explanation and Abductive Reasoning. In Holyoak, K.
and Morrison, R., editors, The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning,
pages 260–276. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Lycan, W. G. (1985). Epistemic Value. Synthese, 64:137–164.
Lycan, W. G. (1988). Judgment and Justification. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Lycan, W. G. (2012). Explanationist Rebuttals (Coherentism Defended Again).
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 50:5–20.
Mackonis, A. (2011). Inference to the Best Explanation, Coherence and Other
Explanatory Virtues. Synthese, 190:975–995.
Magnus, P. (2010). Inductions, Red Herrings, and the Best Explanation for the
Mixed Records of Science. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science,
61:803–819.
McCain, K. and Moretti, L. (2022). Appearance and Explanation. Oxford
References 71
McCain, K. and Poston, T. (2014). Why Explanatoriness Is Evidentially

Relevant. Thought, 3:145–153.
McCain, K. and Poston, T. (2018). The Evidential Impact of Explanatory
Considerations. In McCain, K. and Poston, T., editors, Best Explanations:
New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation, pages 121–129. Oxford
McCain, K. and Poston, T. (2019). Dispelling the Disjunction Objection to
Explanatory Inference. Philosopher’s Imprint, 19(36):1–8.
McGrew, T. (2003). Confirmation, Heuristics, and Explanatory Reasoning.
McMullin, E. (1987). Explanatory Success and the Truth of Theory. In Rescher,
N., editor, Scientific Inquiry in Philosophical Perspective, pages 51–73.
University Press of America, Lanham, MD.
McMullin, E. (1992). The Inference that Makes Science. Marquette University
Press, Milwaukee, WI.
Minnameier, G. (2004). Peirce-Suit of Truth - Why Inference to the Best
Explanation and Abduction Ought Not to Be Confused. Erkenntnis, 60:75–
105.
Morreau, M. (2015). Theory Choice and Social Choice: Kuhn Vindicated.
Mind, 124:239–262.
Musgrave, A. (1988). The Ultimate Argument for Scientific Realism. In
Nola, R., editor, Relativism and Realism in Science, pages 229–252. Kluwer
Academic, Dordrecht.
Neta, R. (2013). What Is an Inference. Philosophical Issues, 23(1):388–407.
Niiniluoto, I. (1999). Defending Abduction. Philosophy of Science (Proceed-

ings Supplement), 66:S436–S451.
Niiniluoto, I. (2018). Truth-Seeking by Abduction. Springer, Cham.
Nolan, D. (1997). Quantitative Parsimony. British Journal for the Philosophy
of Science, 48:329–343.
Nyrup, R. (2015). How Explanatory Reasoning Justifies Pursuit: A Peircean
View of IBE. Philosophy of Science, 82:749–760.
Okasha, S. (2000). Van Fraassen’s Critique of Inference to the Best Explana-
tion. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 31:691–710.
Okasha, S. (2011). Theory Choice and Social Choice: Kuhn versus Arrow.
Mind, 120:83–115.
Okasha, S. (2015). On Arrow’s Theorem and Scientific Rationality: Reply to
Morreau and Stegenga. Mind, 124:279–294.
Okasha, S. and Thébault, K. (2020). Is There a Bayesian Justification of
Hypothetico-Deductive Inference? Noûs, 54:774–794.
72 References
Peirce, C. S. (1958). The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Harvard

University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Pettigrew, R. (2021). On the Pragmatic and Epistemic Virtues of Inference to
the Best Explanation. Synthese, 199:12407–12438.
Poston, T. (2014). Reason and Explanation: A Defense of Explanatory Coher-
entism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Priest, G. (2016). Logical Disputes and the a Priori. Logique et Analyse,
59:347–366.
Psillos, S. (1999). Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth. Routledge,
London.
Quine, W. V. O. and Ullian, J. S. (1978). The Web of Belief. Random House,
New York.
Roche, W. and Sober, E. (2013). Explanatoriness Is Evidentially Irrelevant,
or Inference to the Best Explanation meets Bayesian Confirmation Theory.
Analysis, 73:659–668.
Roche, W. and Sober, E. (2014). Explanatoriness and Evidence: A Reply to
McCain and Poston. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 3:193–199.
Roche, W. and Sober, E. (2017). Is Explanatoriness a Guide to Confirmation? A
Reply to Climenhaga. Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift
für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, 48:581–590.
Roche, W. and Sober, E. (2019). Inference to the Best Explanation and the
Screening-Off Challenge. Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy,
38:121–142.
Roush, S. (2005). Tracking Truth: Knowledge, Evidence, and Science. Claren-
don Press, Oxford.

Rowbottom, D. P. (2019). The Instrument of Science: Scientific Anti-realism
Revitalised. Routledge, London.
Ruhmkorff, S. (2011). Some Difficulties for the Problem of Unconceived
Alternatives. Philosophy of Science, 78:875–886.
Salmon, W. C. (1990). Rationality and Objectivity in Science, or Tom Kuhn
Meets Tom Bayes. In Savage, W., editor, Minnesota Studies in the Philos-
ophy of Science, Volume 14, pages 175–204. Minnesota University Press,
Minneapolis, MN.
Salmon, W. C. (2001). Explanation and Confirmation: A Bayesian Critique
of Inference to the Best Explanation. In Hon, G. and Rakover, S. S., edi-
tors, Explanation: Theoretical Approaches and Applications, pages 61–91.
Springer, Dordrecht.
Sankey, H. (2008). Scientific Method. In Psillos, S. and Curd, M., editors, The
Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, pages 248–258. Routledge,
London.
References 73
Schickore, J. (2022). Scientific Discovery. In Zalta, E. N. and Nodelman, U.,

editors, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition).
Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/win2022/entries/scientific-discovery/.
Schindler, S. (2018). Theoretical Virtues in Science. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Schupbach, J. N. (2014). Is the Bad Lot Objection Just Misguided? Erkenntnis,
79:55–64.
Schupbach, J. N. (2022). Bayesianism and Scientific Reasoning. Cambridge
Elements in the Philosophy of Science. Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge.
Shaffer, M. J. (2021). Van Fraassen’s Best of a Bad Lot Objection, IBE and
Rationality. Logique Et Analyse, 255:267–273.
Shimony, A. (1970). Scientific Inference. In Colodny, R. G., editor, The Nature
and Function of Scientific Theories, pages 79–172. University of Pittsburgh
Press, Pittsburgh, PA.
Sklar, L. (1981). Do Unborn Hypotheses Have Rights? Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly, 62:17–29.
Smithson, R. (2017). The Principle of Indifference and Inductive Scepticism.
Sober, E. (1994). Let’s Razor Ockham’s Razor. In From a Biological Point of
View, pages 136–157. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Sober, E. (2015). Ockham’s Razors: A User’s Manual. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Stanford, P. K. (2006). Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the

Problem of Unconceived Alternatives. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Stegenga, J. (2015). Theory Choice and Social Choice: Okasha versus Sen.
Mind, 124:263–277.
Strevens, M. (2000). Do Large Probabilities Explain Better? Philosophy of
Science, 67:366–390.
Swinburne, R. (1997). Simplicity as Evidence for Truth. Marquette University
Press, Milwaukee, WI.
Thagard, P. R. (1978). The Best Explanation: Criteria for Theory Choice. The
Journal of Philosophy, 75:76–92.
van Fraassen, B. C. (1980). The Scientific Image. Clarendon, Oxford.
van Fraassen, B. C. (1984). Belief and the Will. Journal of Philosophy, 81:235–
256.
van Fraassen, B. C. (1989). Laws and Symmetry. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
van Fraassen, B. C. (2000). The False Hopes of Traditional Epistemology.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60:253–280.
74 References
van Fraassen, B. C. (2002). The Empirical Stance. Yale University Press, New
Haven, CT.
van Fraassen, B. C. (2007). From a View of Science to a New Empiricism. In
Monton, B., editor, Images of Empiricism: Essays on Science and Stances,
with a Reply from Bas C. van Fraassen, pages 337–385. Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
Vogel, J. (2005). Inference to the Best Explanation. In Craig, E., editor, The
Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge, London, pages
445–446.
Voltaire, M. (1759). An Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of
Nations: From the Reign of Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV. J. Nourse,
London.
Weintraub, R. (2013). Induction and Inference to the Best Explanation. Philo-
sophical Studies, 166:203–216.
Weisberg, J. (2009). Locating IBE in the Bayesian Framework. Synthese,
167:125–143.
Weisberg, J. (2020). Belief in Psyontology. Philosopher’s Imprint, 20(11):1–
27.
Whewell, W. (1858). Novum Organum Renovatum. John W. Parker and Son,
London, 3rd edition.
Williamson, T. (2016). Abductive Philosophy. The Philosophical Forum,
47:263–280.
Woodward, J. (2006). Some Varieties of Robustness. Journal of Economic
Methodology, 13:219–240.
Wray, K. B. (2008). The Argument from Underconsideration as Grounds for

Anti-realism. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 22:317–
326.
Wray, K. B. (2011). Epistemic Privilege and the Success of Science. Nous,
46:375–385.
Wray, K. B. (2018). Resisting Scientfic Realism. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Acknowledgments
I am extremely grateful for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this
manuscript from Nevin Climenhaga, Marc Lange, Kevin McCain, James Nor-
ton, Mattias Skipper, Olav Vassend, and two referees for Cambridge University
Press. On a more personal note, I began thinking systematically about abduc-
tive reasoning when my first daughter Katrín was still a toddler; her insatiable
desire to have things thoroughly explained to her has been an inspiration ever
since.
Jacob Stegenga
University of Cambridge
Jacob Stegenga is a Reader in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at
the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on fundamental topics in
reasoning and rationality and philosophical problems in medicine and biology. Prior to
joining Cambridge he taught in the United States and Canada, and he received his PhD
from the University of California San Diego.
About the Series

This series of Elements in Philosophy of Science provides an extensive overview of the
themes, topics and debates which constitute the philosophy of science. Distinguished
specialists provide an up-to-date summary of the results of current research on their
topics, as well as offering their own take on those topics and drawing original
conclusions.
Elements in the Series

Bayesianism and Scientific Reasoning
Jonah N. Schupbach
Fundamentality and Grounding
Kerry McKenzie
Values in Science
Kevin C. Elliott
Scientific Representation
James Nguyen and Roman Frigg
Philosophy of Open Science
Sabina Leonelli
Natural Kinds
Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Scientific Progress
Darrell P. Rowbottom
Modelling Scientific Communities
Cailin O’Connor
Logical Empiricism as Scientific Philosophy
Alan W. Richardson
Scientific Models and Decision Making
Eric Winsberg and Stephanie Harvard
Science and the Public

Angela Potochnik
Finnur Dellsén
A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/EPSC

Abductive Reasoning in Science

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Abductive Reasoning in Science

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Abductive Reasoning in Science

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Dellsén

Abductive Reasoning in Science

About the Series Series Editor

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009353199 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cover image: BSIP / Contributor/

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

Elements in Philosophy of Science

Author for correspondence: Finnur Dellsén, [email protected]

Abstract: In abductive reasoning, scientific theories are evaluated on the

Keywords: abduction, inference to the best explanation, scientific reasoning,

© Finnur Dellsén 2024

1 A Brief History of Abductive Reasoning 3

2 Contemporary Accounts of Abductive Reasoning 15

3 Why Prefer Explanatory Hypotheses? 31

4 Is Abductive Reasoning Irrational? 46

coincidence, or that having lung cancer somehow causes smoking.1 On these

way. Furthermore, several philosophers have argued that abductive reasoning

accounts which have motivated philosophers to develop them. As this indi-

soning is somehow irrational or incoherent in some cases. In particular, it has

1 A Brief History of Abductive Reasoning

Descartes (§1.1); discuss Charles S. Peirce’s pioneering work on the form of

1.1 The Historical Roots of Abductive Reasoning

reasoning to play an important role in science (McMullin, 1992, 175–179).

to know through direct apprehension, or “intuition.” In his inﬂuential meth-

period (Thagard, 1978). For example, Antoine Lavoisier’s (1743–1794) work

1.2 Peirce’s Notion of “Abduction”

The surprising fact C is observed.

1.3 The Hypothetico-Deductive Model

The HD model can be thought of as a combination of two ideas. The ﬁrst

The HD model (scientific confirmation): A theory T is confirmed (to some

The HD model (scientiﬁc inference): A theory T may be inferred to be true,

1.4 Inference to the Best Explanation

will be based on considerations such as which hypothesis is simpler, which

hypothesis.” Furthermore, Harman’s list of considerations for judging whether

(§1.3), according to which the model automatically counts various artiﬁcial

Consider also the second objection to the HD model, which concerned

2 Contemporary Accounts of Abductive Reasoning

2.1 A Classification of Accounts

A second type of accounts may be called probabilistic accounts. These

descriptive accuracy of inferential accounts and the powerful normative frame-

2.2 Inferential Accounts

which it involves drawing a categorical conclusion of some type from a set of

Taking abductive reasoning to be a form of inference still leaves a lot of room

the extent to which one hypothesis exhibits various explanatory virtues to

objection has motivated a number of authors – including van Fraassen him-

and so that we should do away with abductive reasoning entirely. However, as

2.3 Probabilistic Accounts

Bayesian Conditionalization: A rational agent who obtains evidence E (and

Although there are other, arguably somewhat more sophisticated, versions of

which it gets its name – is simply a mathematical theorem of the probability

Perhaps the most straightforward way of ﬁnding a place for abductive

Pr(E|H1 ) Pr(H1 ) < Pr(E|H2 ) Pr(H2 )

theories, given certain natural and independently-motivated assumptions about

An interestingly different emergent probabilistic account is provided by

2.4 Hybrid Accounts

20 Here, we are bumping up against a well-known fundamental challenge for Bayesianism,

type of inference in which theories are accepted on the basis of explanatory

inference, such as IBE, might serve as a reliable heuristic device to approxi-

evidence, which in turn requires repeatedly calculating conditional probabili-

Cover image: BSIP / Contributor/