Inference to the Best Explanation and the Bad Lot Objection

According to Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE), the hypothesis that provides the best explanation for a group of observed phenomena is probably true. One of the key objections against this line of thought is “the bad lot objection”. According to this objection, the idea that the best of available explanatory hypotheses will be more likely to be true presupposes that the truth is already more likely to be found among them. But we have no reason to believe it. The most prominent criticisms against this objection are argument from Bayesianism (Niiniluoto, 2004), argument from a pair of contradictories (Lipton, 1993), argument from self-destruction (Lipton, 1993) and argument from distinction between material content and form of IBE (Schupbach, 2013). In this paper, we evaluate these arguments and show that all the arguments but the last one misses the mark.