Department Colloquium featuring speaker: Nina Emery (Mount Holyoke)

Title: Explanation As a Guide to What There Is and What It’s Like

Abstract: There is a long tradition in philosophy of using principles of explanatory inference to determine what there is and what it’s like. Two prominent examples are Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and contemporary philosophers' use of inference to the best explanation (IBE). The goal of this talk is to argue for a principle of explanatory inference that is more limited than the PSR and IBE but also more powerful. The strength of this alternative principle is its justification by way of naturalistic commitments that are widespread (though not always widely appreciated) throughout contemporary philosophy.