Inferência à melhor explicação reinventada : o impacto do desafio screen-off

Abstract

The present work aims to investigate the impact of the Screen-off challenge (Sober & Roche, 2013; 2019) on the research on Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). In the second chapter, in order to better understand the scope of the objection, I present the general outlines of IBE: in particular, the different attitudes one can have towards its epistemic status, the challenges faced in its articulation, and the main proposals on how to overcome them. In the third chapter, I analyze the Screen-off argument itself and the responses presented so far. In particular, I examine the thesis that explanatoriness makes the degrees of belief in a given hypothesis more resilient (McCain and Poston, 2014, 2017), the suggestion that the flaw actually lies in the idealization of Logical Omniscience inherent in the Bayesian apparatus (McCain and Poston, 2014, 2017; Lange, 2017), the thesis that explanatoriness is indispensable for the inductive projection of certain predicates (Climenhaga, 2017), and finally, the idea that explanatory considerations have epistemic relevance because they indicate what type of explanation one should expect for a given explanandum (Lange, 2017, 2020, 2024). I conclude that none of the explanationist responses presented is able to secure an epistemic role for explanatoriness and that the concessions made within them modify the discourse surrounding Inference to the Best Explanation substantially.