Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Abduction”

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Abduction,” (opens in a new tab)

  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Abduction,”

Objections & responses

Inference to the best explanation only works when the candidate explanations are of a kind we can assess. “A miracle happened” has no background rate, no mechanism, and can explain anything. Doesn’t introducing supernatural hypotheses break the method?

This is the strongest objection to using abduction in apologetics. The reply is that God did it is not offered as a bare hypothesis but as part of a broader view, theism, that makes specific predictions: that the universe has a beginning and is orderly, that moral facts exist, that a certain sort of religious history would occur. Its explanatory power is assessed by comparison with the naturalistic view on all those data together, and it can be disconfirmed: a universe with no moral facts, an eternal past, or a Jesus who stayed dead would each count against it. Whether it wins the comparison is the debate; that it can be entered into the comparison is what this claim defends.

The same Stanford entry devotes long sections to objections to abduction, including that it isn’t a distinct form of inference at all and that “best” is hopelessly vague. Isn’t citing only the supportive lines selective?

The entry does canvass the objections, and the honest summary is that the status of abduction is debated among philosophers of science while its use is nearly universal. The vagueness of best is real. Lipton’s answer, explanatory virtues such as scope, simplicity, and fit with background knowledge, is the standard way of making it precise, and it is the way the resurrection argument on this site tries to proceed: name what each hypothesis explains and fails to explain, rather than declare a winner.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• Inference to the best explanation is a recognized form of reasoning used across science, history, law, and medicine.