INFERRING

&

EXPLAINING

The Quest for Good Evidence

in Philosophical and Everyday Contexts

Jeffery L. Johnson

This manuscript is intended for study purposes only for those students in my courses PHIL 101 Self, World, & God, and PHIL 203 Critical Thinking. It is very much a work in progress, and definitely in DRAFT stage only. I would appreciate hearing about any typos, grammatical infelicities, or substantive errors. Thanks for your patience.

CONTENTS

[Please click on the chapter number icon]

SKEPTICISM

1.1 Confidence Undermining Possibilities

1.2 Dreaming and the External World

1.3 The Evil Computer Scientist

1.4 Can I Know Anything?

1.5 The Quest for Certainty

THE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE

2.1 Definitions and Word Games

2.2 The Myth of Definition

2.3 The Need for Conceptual Clarity

2.4 Knowledge and Belief

2.5 The Search for the Truth

2.6 Epistemic Justification

2.7 What Does It Take to Be Justified?

2.8 An Unsolved Problem

GOOD EVIDENCE

3.1 Evidence of Academic Dishonesty

3.2 Evidence and Explanation

3.3 Applying the Recipe

3.4 Inference to the BEST Explanation

3.5 What Happened to the Dinosaurs?

CONFIRMATION AND NEW DATA

4.1 A Pretty Picture of Science

4.2 The Positivists' View of Science

4.3 Some Problems for Logical Positivism

4.4 The Strange Case of the Childbed Fever Deaths

4.5 Inference to the Best Explanation and New Data

TESTIMONY

5.1 The Word of Others

5.2 Mystical Testimony

5.3 Evaluating St. Teresa's testimony

5.4 First-Person Authority?

5.5 The Range of Mystical testimony

5.6 A Neuro-physiological Account

5.7 What is the Best Explanation

TEXTS AND INTERPRETATION

6.1 Inference to the Best Explanation and Textual Interpretation

6.2 A Working Theory of Constitutional Interpretation

6.3 Is the Death Penalty Unconstitutional?

6.4 Rank Ordering Interpretive Theories

STATISTICAL EVIDENCE

7.1 Explaining the Numbers

7.2 Explaining the Correlations

7.3 Some Very Disturbing Data

7.4 Statistics and the Death Penalty

APPENDIX A  New Teleological Argument

APPENDIX B [The paper originally contained here has been superceded by two more recent discussion of the problem of evil.  Here are links to those papers.]

Friendly Natural Theology

Mystery & Evil