Inferring and Explaining

149 endorsed by equally intelligent and refective evidence assessors. Te district attorney and Abe held dramatically diferent interpretations regarding Hamilton and the murder. I believe Mary Ann and Wanda should have placed more confdence in the criminal justice system and not murdered Earl; the ladies saw things very diferently. Intellectual disagreement seems to count heavily against my claims for explana- tory and narrative skill. How can Justice Black- mun and Justice Scalia be skilled constitutional explainers and story judgers when they see things so dramatically diferently with respect to the death penalty and the Constitution?Tese worries are legitimate and require attention and potential solutions. A big part of the story to be told here is one of simple intellectual modesty. One can be very skilled at something and at the same time fail spectacularly at exercising the skill. We are all skilled at recognizing faces. But we still misperceive all the time—“Hi Joanie! Oh, sorry, you look just like my mother-in-law.” Major league hitters perform the minor miracle of hit- ting ninety-fve-mile-an-hour fastballs, but they also swing wildly, miss, and look foolish, and lest we forget, they fail to get base hits between two-thirds and three-quarters of the time. Fur- thermore, the skills that I am basing my argu- ment uponwere developed, honed, and tested in hunter-gatherer times.Tey can only be applied to science and the law by extension. Humans do not readily engage in [the highly abstract reasoning required in modern science, phi- losophy, government, commerce, and law]. In most times, places, and stages of development consists of quantities “one,” “two,” and “many” . . . Teir political philosophy is based on kin, clan, tribe and vendetta, not on the social contract. . . . And their morality is a mixture of intuitions of purity, author- ity, loyalty, conformity, and reciprocity, not general- ized notions of fairness and justice . . . Nevertheless, some humans were able to invent the diferent com- ponents of modern knowledge, and all are capable of learning them. 18 Please don’tmisreadmymeaning here. I’mreally good at spottingmymother-in-law, I’m in awe of the hitting prowess of the guys on my fantasy team, and as a teacher, I know frsthand that students, even the mediocre ones, can cast aside kin, clan, and vendetta and learn to embrace the social contract and justice and fairness. Truth Let’s see if we can do a little better than the trivial defnition of “truth” I ofered in chap- ter 3—truth = df not-false. Inference to the best narrative is unapologetic about a close connec- tion between narrative superiority and truth. Te best story does not guarantee truth, but it does constitute evidence for what the truth is. Perhaps there is a better yet story that no one has thought to tell—that’s certainly been the case at specifc points in the history of science. Perhaps, as I believe is ofen the case withmany narratives, the best story is one that actually combines elements and insights from the com- peting narratives. But this is the nature of evi- dencegenerally. Even the strongest evidence can point in the wrong direction—evidence is not logical proof. But none of this implies that we should disregard evidence. Indeed, what choice do we really have but to base all our considered exPlanatory VIrtue and truth