Introduction

When philosophers discuss the topic of explanation, they usually have in mind the following question: given the beliefs one has and some proposition that one wishes to explain, which subset of the beliefs constitutes an explanation of the target proposition? That is, the philosophical ‘problem of explanation’ typically has bracketed the issue of how one obtains the beliefs; they are taken as given. The problem of explanation has been the problem of understanding the relation ‘x explains y'. Since Hempel (1965) did so much to canonize this way of thinking about explanation, it deserves to be called ‘Hempel's problem’.

The broad heading for my paper departs from this Hempelian format. I am interested in how we might justify some of the explanatory propositions in our stock of beliefs. Of course, issues of theory confirmation and acceptance are really not so distant from the topic of explanation. After all, it is standard to describe theory evaluation as the procedure of ‘inference to the best explanation’. Hypotheses are accepted, at least partly, in virtue of their ability to explain. If this is right, then the epistemology of explanations is closely related to Hempel's problem.

I should say at the outset that I take the philosopher's term ‘inference to the best explanation’ with a grain of salt. Lots of hypotheses are accepted on the testimony of evidence even though the hypotheses could not possibly be explanatory of the evidence. We infer the future from the present; we also infer one event from another simultaneously occurring event with which the first is correlated. Yet, the future does not explain the present; nor can one event explain another that occurs simultaneously with the first.