Inferring and Explaining

150 InferrIng and exPlaInIng judgments, not just in law and scholarship, but in every aspect of our lives, on what the best available evidence tells us is likely true? Legal, constitutional, and scholarly truth, just like truth in science and regarding violent ex-husbands, remains philosophically prob- lematic. I agree with Peter Kosso that the most intuitive sense of truth—at least inmost explan- atory contexts—is the correspondence theory, but that correspondence must be inferred from coherence. Tough truth is correspondence with the facts it can- not be recognized by its correspondence. We cannot rely on the facts to guide proofs of scientifc theories, since the facts are irretrievably at the outer end of the correspondence relation. . . . So any indicators of truth must be internal. . . . Te process of justifying, then, is a process of comparing aspects of the system, and the accomplishment of justifcation is the demonstration of coherence among the aspects. 19 Such a model captures our intuitions about what really happened to Nicole and Ron or at the record hop. Tere aren’t just stories to be told about these happenings, but clearly, some stories are better than others—stories that point us to the truth. We believe that there’s a world out there, though we will never see it from the God’s eye perspective, and in this world, things happened involving O. J., Connie’s boyfriend, and the rest. Tese external happenings play a signifcant role in what counts as true. Tings get much trickier, however, when we consider the best narrative concerning Brown v. Board of Education or Mary Ann and Wanda’s predicament. We are still confdent that there is a best story or, at least, stories that are sig- nifcantly better than others. But where does narrative superiority now point? What of the standard jurisprudential questions of how to interpret a statute, a line of precedent, or a con- stitutional text? Or even how to interpret the sad events confronting Mary Ann and Wanda? To reiterate the previous argument, I claim that in these cases we tell stories that try to make sense of the relevant texts and precedent as well as Earl’s violent behavior and Geneva’s story about Brown . When we tell these stories, we tell them with passion and conviction. We are convinced that our story is the best or, at least, a heck of a lot better than the other sto- ries that are out there. Does inference to the best narrative not somuch discover the truth but actually create the truth? Tis would be a mis- characterized insight. Te insight, of course, is that few of us believe there is a Platonic heaven where moral and interpretive truth live and to where we can retreat to adjudicate controver- sies involving Earl’s murder or how we should understand Brown v. Board of Education . But it is mischaracterized because truth is not being created in the way Derrick Bell was able to make up his story about the disappearing black schoolchildren. It makes perfectly good sense to insist that there is an “objectively” best nar- rative, even when reasonable people disagree about what it is. And what other laudatory title would we bestow on such a superior narrative other than “true”?