Abstract
Many epistemologists take Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) to be “fundamental.”
For instance, Lycan (1988, 128) writes that “all justified reasoning is fundamentally
explanatory reasoning.” Conee and Feldman (2008, 97) concur: “fundamental epistemic principles are principles of best explanation.” Call them fundamentalists. They assert that nothing deeper could justify IBE, as is typically assumed of rules of
deductive inference, such as modus ponens. However, logicians account for modus ponens with the valuation rule for the material conditional. By contrast, fundamentalists account for IBE with an ill-defined set of relations
that happen to furnish their favorite set of inductive inferences. To our eye, this
seems a little too convenient—there is too much room for ad hoc, just-so stories about
the “striking” correspondence between our explanatory and inductive practices.
We will argue that the (explanatory) pluralism adopted by the leading theorists
of the best explanation—philosophers of science—undermines fundamentalism.
Section 1 clarifies fundamentalism’s key tenets. Section 2 presents pluralism’s challenge to fundamentalism. Section 3 considers a potential fundamentalist reply to this challenge. Sections 4 through 6 canvass the leading candidates for developing this
fundamentalist reply, showing each to be unsatisfactory.