Inferring and Explaining

46 InferrIng and exPlaInIng Don’t Forget about the Final Assessment of the Evidence! When I assess the evidence for Pinker and Bloom’s hypothesis utilizing the inference-to-the-best- explanation recipe, my rank ordering in step 3 commitsme tomyfnal evaluation. Forme, t 0 pro- vides thebest explanationof theevidenceadduced in support of Pinker and Bloom’s hypothesis. Terefore, the evidence theymarshal is very strong . Chomsky and Gould would come to a very diferent evaluation of the evidence. For them, t 0 fails to provide the best explanation of Pinker and Bloom’s evidence; t 1 provides a better expla- nation. Terefore, the evidence presented in the article is poor . Joyclynn Potter would agree with Chomsky and Gould but for a very diferent reason. She also believes that t 0 fails to provide the best explanation of Pinker and Bloom’s evidence, but she is convinced that t 2 is the superior explana- tion. Terefore, she would also say that the evi- dence in their article is poor . A Magical Encore? Quite by accident, I discovered a glitch in the iPod sofware. On a Saturday night last year, my wife and I went to a banquet for the League of Oregon Cities.Te entertainment was PinkMar- tini, a Portland band I like a lot. I had already planned that I was going to ask for two songs when they came back for an encore—“Lilly” and “Que Sera Sera.” As it turned out, they did “Que Sera Sera” as part of their concert, and there was no chance to ask when they did their encore. On Sunday, as we drove back from Portland, I plugged in my iPod to listen to them again. I set the settings to “All” and to “Shufe Songs.” Tis meant that my iPod searched through both of their albums, found all thirty-six songs and played them in “random” order.Tat’s the glitch! Te last two songs were “Lilly” and “Que Sera Sera.”Te exact encore I had imagined the night before! What are the odds of this? My theory is that these two songs came up last, not randomly, but because of all the Pink Martini songs, I lis- ten to these two the most ofen. I am thinking of writing to Apple to tell them about the problem. Tis crazy philosopher has a theory that there is a glitch in the iPod sofware. For practice, and to make sure you’ve got the IBE recipe down pat, take a fewminutes, and using all four steps in the inference-to-the-best-explanation recipe assess the quality of evidence he has for this theory. exerCIses 1. What is a rival explanation? 2. What are the four steps in the inference-to-the-best-explanation recipe? Why was I tempted to add a ffth step? 3. What is the advantage of imagining all argument analysis, or evidence evaluation, as a discussion between ideal agnostics? 4. At the end of chapter 4, I ask you to schematize Leslie’s argument for her theory that Johnny had left her and taken up with Judy (p. 35). That was step 1 in the IBE recipe. Now use the other three steps to determine whether Leslie’s evidence is strong, weak, or just so-so.