Inference to the Best Theory, Rather than Inference to the Best Explanation — Kinds of Abduction and Induction

An interesting consequence of the theory of nomic truth approximation, as developed in my From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism (Kuipers T, From instrumentalism to constructive realism. On some relations between confirmation, empirical progress, and truth approximation. Synthese Library 287. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2000), and enriched in this book, concerns so-called ‘inference to the best explanation’ (IBE). It can be argued that this popular rule among scientific realists can better be replaced by, various kinds of, ‘inference to the best theory’ (IBT). This chapter provides a survey of observational, theoretical, and referential kinds of IBT and discusses when and in what sense they may be seen as cases of ‘abduction’, that is, arguments for which an ‘abductive’ formulation and, hence, justification can be given in the minimal sense of Peirce.