Inference to the Best Explanation: a comparison of approaches
David H. Glass · 2009
In the form of inference known as inference to the best explanation (IBE) there are various ways to characterize what is meant by the best explanation. This paper considers a number of such characterizations including several based on confirmation measures and several based on coherence measures. The goal is to find a measure which adequately captures what is meant by ‘best’ and that also yields the true explanation with a high degree of probability. Computer simulations are used to show that the overlap coherence measure achieves this goal, enabling the true explanation to be identified almost as often as an approach which simply selects the most probable explanation.