2024/11/20 by Mattias Skipper, Olav Benjamin Vassend · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Philosophy and History of Science #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Philosophy and Theoretical Science
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/nous.12539
openalex publication_date 2024/11/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Abstract A major open question in the borderlands between epistemology and philosophy of science concerns whether Bayesian updating and abductive inference are compatible. Some philosophers—most influentially Bas van Fraassen—have argued that they are not. Others have disagreed, arguing that abduction, properly understood, is indeed compatible with Bayesianism. Here we present two formal results that allow us to tackle this question from a new angle. We start by formulating what we take to be a minimal version of the claim that abduction is a rational pattern of reasoning. We then show that this minimal abductivist principle, when combined with Bayesian updating by conditionalization, places surprisingly strong and controversial constraints on how we must measure explanatory power. The lesson is not that Bayesianism is definitely incompatible with abduction, but that both compatibilism and incompatibilism have hitherto unrecognized consequences. We end the paper by formulating these consequences in the form of a trilemma.