The Inference to the Best Explanation
By G. Harman. 1965
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
- Doug Lombardi
- Gale M. Sinatra
- Giovanni Pezzulo
- Karl J. Friston
- E. Michael Nussbaum
- ChrisD . Frith
- Jörg Cassens
- Frode Sørmo
Citations in the corpus
- Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences (2017, background): “Harman [62] is perhaps the first to acknowledge this link, and more recently, experimental evaluations have demonstrated it [108, 187, 109, 153].”
- Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience (2007, methodology): “The alternative I have in mind is just the familiar default “method” of inference to the best explanation, that is the approach of looking for the framework that makes the most sense of all the data, not just reports (Harman, 1965; Peirce, 1903, Vol V, p. 171).”
- Two Strategies for Inductive Reasoning in Organizational Research (2010, background): “IBE can be adopted by realists and anti-realists alike, but its origins are in realist philosophy (e.g., Harman, 1965).”
- Active Inference, Curiosity and Insight (2017, background): “As such, it can be thought of as inference to the best explanation (Harman, 1965), or abductive reasoning.”
- Plausibility Judgments in Conceptual Change and Epistemic Cognition (2016, background): “Subsequently, analogical and plausibilistic reasoning may be connected if the inference used in making an analogy is abductive in nature (i.e., inferences to the best explanation; Harman, 1965).”
- Hansonian and Harmanian Abduction as Models of Discovery (2006, methodology): “Peirce is one part of the background for IBE, but IBE is based more importantly on Gilbert Harman’s writings and formulations in the 1960s (e.g. Harman 1965).”
- Explanation in Case-Based Reasoning–Perspectives and Goals (2005, background): “Important early contributions were made by Harman (1965) , Bromberger (1965), and Salmon (1971).”
- Explanations and Context in the Emergence of Students' Informal Inferential Reasoning (2011, background): “Epistemologically, there are two kinds of abduction (Magnini, 2009): An abduction that generates a plausible hypothesis (e.g., Peirce), and an abduction that evaluates if this is the best explanation to the inference (Harman, 1965; Lipton, 2004).”