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In this essay I examine Roche and Sober’s (R&S) thesis that explanation is evidentially irrelevant, clarify the nodal points of disagreement, and defend explanationism. To do this, I utilize William Lycan’s categories of explanationism (2002) and a distinction between per se explanatoriness and particular explanatoriness. These help show that e...

Replication of a finding is a sign – for some, the only sign – of scientific truth. Evidential discordance compromises truth, because discordance in scientific evidence means that a finding has not been reliably replicated. We distinguish between different types of evidential discordance, and single out persistent evidential discordance as a pa...

In this article I briefly introduce a Hybrid Theory of Induction (HTI) and illustrate the kind of work it can do for us. I do so by exploring a particular kind of causal inference in comparative group studies from the perspective of the HTI. I show how the HTI provides a useful common framework to understand ongoing debates, methodological guidance...

Mixed methods research - the combination of qualitative and quantitative data within the same research design to strengthen causal inference - is gaining prominence in the social sciences, but its benefits are contested. Social scientists and philosophers have sought to cash out the epistemic rationale of mixed-methods research but none of the avai...

Frank Cabrera argues that informational explanatory virtues—specifically, mechanism, precision, and explanatory scope—cannot be confirmational virtues, since hypotheses that possess them must have a lower probability than less virtuous, entailed hypotheses. We argue against Cabrera’s characterization of confirmational virtue and for an altern...

In 1945, Carl Hempel proposed a simple theory of confirmation that eventually came to be seen as unacceptably unsophisticated: it failed to incorporate the impact of epistemic context, of the "superempirical virtues" such as simplicity and explanatory elegance, and it was purely qualitative, determining when a piece of evidence supported a hypothes...