Tag Archives: explanationism

Kevin McCAIN ABSTRACT: In a recent issue of this journal, Miloud Belkoniene challenges explanationist accounts of evidential support in two ways. First, he alleges that there are cases that show explanatory virtues are not linked to the truth of hypotheses. Second, he maintains that attempts to show that explanatoriness is relevant to evidential support because it adds to the resiliency …

Miloud BELKONIENE ABSTRACT: This paper discusses an assumption on which explanationist accounts of the evidential support relation rely with a focus on McCain’s recent account. Explanationist accounts define the relation of evidential support in terms of relations of best explanation that hold between the evidence a subject possesses and the propositions she believes. Such a definition presupposes that the explanatory …

Kevin McCAIN ABSTRACT: Explanationism is a plausible view of epistemic justification according to which justification is a matter of explanatory considerations. Despite its plausibility, explanationism is not without its critics. In a recent issue of this journal T. Ryan Byerly and Kraig Martin have charged that explanationism fails to provide necessary or sufficient conditions for epistemic justification. In this article I …

T. Ryan BYERLY, Kraig MARTIN ABSTRACT: We argue that explanationist views in epistemology continue to face persistent challenges to both their necessity and their sufficiency. This is so despite arguments offered by Kevin McCain in a paper recently published in this journal which attempt to show otherwise. We highlight ways in which McCain’s attempted solutions to problems we had previously raised …

Kevin McCAIN ABSTRACT: Explanationists about epistemic justification hold that justification depends upon explanatory considerations. After a bit of a lull, there has recently been a resurgence of defenses of such views. Despite the plausibility of these defenses, explanationism still faces challenges. Recently, T. Ryan Byerly and Kraig Martin have argued that explanationist views fail to provide either necessary or sufficient conditions …