A study of explanatory virtues

The inference to the best explanation (IBE) appeals to how hypotheses would explain certain facts. If a hypothesis explains well and better than any other (available) hypotheses, IBE concludes that it is true. Our work examines what makes it the case that some hypotheses would explain facts better than others. We also examine other non-explanatory features which are (thought to be) correlated with the truth of a proposed explanation. We name all these features explanatory virtues, and they are the measure employed by IBE of goodness of explanation. Our research has the purpose of investigating four chief (proposed) explanatory virtues: simplicity, unification, non ad hocness, and coherence. We intend to study the description and justification of these proposed virtues. Our final goal is to improve and appraise the employment of IBE, a valuable tool in philosophy.

What else happened to English? A brief for the Celtic hypothesis

This article argues that despite traditional skepticism among most specialists on the history of English that Brythonic Celtic languages could have had any significant structural impact on English's evolution, the source of periphrastic do in Cornish's equivalent construction is virtually impossible to deny on the basis of a wide range of evidence. That Welsh and Cornish borrowed the construction from English is impossible given its presence in Breton, whose speakers left Britain in the fifth century. The paucity of Celtic loanwords in English is paralleled by equivalent paucity in undisputed contact cases such as Uralic's on Russian. Traditional language-internal accounts suffer from a degree of ad hocness. Finally, periphrastic do is much rarer cross-linguistically than typically acknowledged, which lends further support to a contact account.