Inferring and Explaining

40 InferrIng and exPlaInIng Inference to the best explanation asks us to judge one of these explanations as better than all the rest. How in the world do we start the pro- cess of judging one explanation as superior to another?What counts andwhat doesn’t count in such a comparison?We will address this in some detail in a later chapter, but for now, let’s simply phrase the question as “ Which account makes the best sense of what we know? ” I assume that both t 1 and t 2 would rank way down on your list, compared to t 0 and t 3 . Isn’t part of the reason for this, the fact that both of them introduce something “out of the blue” to explain the absence? Where did this mysterious laundry detergent come from? Or this whole grudge on the part of someone she had consid- ered her best friend? What about t 0 and t 3 , however? Tey both seem reasonable enough. Let me simply assert some factors that do not count in rank ordering explanations. Te best explanation is not neces- sarily the one we like the best, nor the one that best accords with our politics, religion, or moral perspectives. It is the one that is most plausible . Here comes a scary fact! You have to make the judgment about which explanation is best. Tere is no “objective,” “reliable” test or formula you can utilize that automatically identifes the best explanation. Te whole recipe, therefore, rests on a step that is candidly, unavoidably subjective . When it comes to favors of ice cream or styles of beer, being subjectivemeans that people’s prefer- ences are relative to who they are and are, conse- quently, all over the place. If evidence evaluation is the same, we’re done for, and I can stop writing my book and teaching my courses as I do. Fortu- nately, I believe, explanatory plausibility is very diferent from beer preferences. Even though each of us, individual subjects, must rank order alternative accounts for ourselves, it turns out that in a great number of contexts—courts of law, thenatural sciences, and even stories about suspi- cious lipstick stains— subjective judgments about plausibility can turn out to be intersubjective . When all is said and done, whenwe think about it as free from prejudice and bias as we can be, we discover widespread agreement about what the best explanation is. We are the most intelligent species that has ever existed, and part of being intelligent is being darn good at spotting the best explanation of what’s happening around us. I rank order our four explanations in the fol- lowing order: t 0 . He had been smooching Mary Jane dur- ing the half-hour absence. t 3 . The stain came from a previous episode of smooching when Connie was wearing red lipstick. t 1 . The lipstick changed from pink to red because of a chemical reaction with his mother’s laundry detergent. t 2 . Mary Jane staged the whole thing out of revenge. I grant you that t 0 and t 3 are pretty close to one another, but I think Connie would not have been so surprised at all of this if she regularly wore bright red lipstick, and besides, the whole idea of Connie having red lipstick is sort of out of the blue as well. Assessment of (Connie’s) Evidence Te whole purpose of the inference-to-the-best- explanation recipe is to assess the quality of