Inferring and Explaining

151 exerCIses 1. How can a major league hitter possibly hit a ninety-fve-mile-an-hour fastball if he can’t exPlanatory VIrtue and truth say how he does it? 2. What do the two Sally and Ann stories tell us about our ability to make sense of what oth- ers do? 3. Is there an objective truth about what happened to Hamilton’s partner? Is there an objec- tive truth about what Mary Ann and Wanda should do? What does all this say about the notion of truth in the frst place? QuIz fIfteen What are the two problems for inference to the best explanation (and for inference to the best narrative) that were identifed by David H. Glass? What is my proposed solution to these two problems? Do you think my solution works? Why, or why not? Notes 1 Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 152. 2 David H. Glass, “Inference to the Best Explanation: Does It Track Truth?,” Synthese: An International Journal for Epistemology, Methodology and Philosophy of Science 185, no. 3 (2012): 411–27. 3 Gilbert Harman, “Te Inference to the Best Explana- tion,” Philosophical Review 74, no.1 (1965): 88–89. 4 NoamChomsky, Aspects of theTeory of Syntax (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956), 8. 5 Jason Stanley, KnowHow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), vii. 6 Plato, Te Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 133. 7 Michael Polanyi, Te Tacit Dimension (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1966), 4. 8 Polanyi, 4. 9 David Epstein, Te Sports Gene (New York: Penguin, 2013), 4. 10 Larry Wright, Better Reasoning (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1982), v. 11 Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 134. 12 Boyd, 1. 13 Paul Bloom, Descartes’ Baby (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 9–10. 14 Bloom, 11–12. 15 Bloom, 13–14. 16 Boyd, Origin of Stories , 149. 17 Lisa òunshine, WhyWeReadFiction:Teory of Mindand the Novel (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2006), 7. 18 Steven Pinker, Language, Cognition, and Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 359. 19 Peter Kosso, Reading the Book of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 136.