Lipton I B E Ch 9 Loveliness And Truth
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Summary - attempting now to deal with justification — in particular to show that IBE doesn’t raise any new justification problems - 2 objections: - 1. Hungerford’s: loveliness is too subjective — ~: reliable inference is also subjective (cf Kuhn) — ~: loveliness criteria do not increase subjectivity (as a lot of them are also inferential criteria) - 2. Voltaire’s: why should loveliness and likeliness coincide? — Given the problems raised by Hume, only positions that claim less use of induction than IBE can possibly be deemed better. — e.g. Van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism: acceptance of a theory involving unobservables really only involves belief that observable consequences are true. — ~: not descriptively accurate — ~: may not even be consistent (e.g. belief in “swarms” of particles but not the particles themselves) — But even this position is still vulnerable to Voltaire’s objection. — Hence one can say that Voltaire’s objection reduces to Hume’s problem. — ~ Voltaire: our inferences are not actually all that reliable
two-stage process for inference selection: 1. generating candidates; 2. selecting candidates. — explanation plays role in both stages
underconsideration:
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What do I think?
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