Inferring and Explaining

146 InferrIng and exPlaInIng Virtually everyone who has survived past infancy has a more or less well developed set of perceptual skills. Tese skills may be generally described as the ability to tell what’s going on (sometimes) simply by seeing it . . . Tis ability to tell what’s going on—or what’s gone on—evenwhenwe are not confronting it directly. We can ofen tell what has happened from the traces it leaves. We can tell there was a frost by the dam- aged trees; we know it rained because the mountains are green; we can tell John had some trouble on the way home from the store by the rumpled fender and the broken headlight. We reconstruct the event from its telltale consequences. It is this diagnostic skill we exploit in themost basic sort of inductive arguments; it is the foundation of our ability to evaluate evidence. 10 Tis quasi-perceptual skill iswhat allows us to see what’s going on and what’s true or at least what’s the best bet givenwhatwe know. And the fact that the precise nature of this skill has proven incred- iblydifcult to articulate innoway counts against its existence and utility. Can anyone seriously doubt that Pete Rose knew how to hit because he could not say how he was able to hit? Literary Darwinism Wright talks of a “diagnostic skill,” “the ability to tell what’s going on.” I’d characterize it as a skill at making sense of things . What is the source of this skill? Te answer to this question leads us directly to Glass’s second worry—“Does IBE track truth?” I am committed, of course, to a resounding afrmative answer. But I certainly owe the inference-to-the-best-explanation and inference-to-the-best-narrative skeptics at least anoutline of “some reason for thinking that it pro- vides a good strategy for determining the truth.” What is sometimes called literary Darwinism traces human storytelling back to evolutionary origins of modern human cognition. Minds exist to predict what will happen next. Tey mine the present for clues they can refne with help from the past—the evolutionary past of the species, the cultural past of the population, and the experien- tial past of the individual—to anticipate the immedi- ate future and guide action. To understand events as they happen, with limited time, knowledge, and com- putational power, minds have evolved to register the regularities pertinent to particular species and infer according to rough-and-ready heuristics. 11 Tis little narrative assumes that we are pretty good at “predict[ing] what will happen next.” But it explains much more than the ubiquity of human storytelling; it accounts for our general ability tomake sense of things, to explainwhat’s going on. We can tell stories to explain things, from a child’s or a country’s pouty “ Tey started it” to why the world is as it is according to myth or science. . . . Why has the richest explanatory story of all, the theory of evolu- tion by natural selection, been so little used to explain why and how stories matter? 12 Inference to the best explanation (IBE) and infer- ence to the best narrative (IBN) track the truth because they rely, at base, on quasi-perceptual skills that were selected for precisely to do this job. Consider this explanatory narrative: Babies may have little control over their bodies, but they can willingly move their heads and eyes. And