It’s all relative: Explanationism and probabilistic evidence theory

Abstract

I provide a brief comment on Allen & Pardo’s “Relative plausibility and its critics”. I agree that their relative plausibility explanationism (RPE) provides an attractive positive description of fact finding in litigation. But unlike Allen & pardo, I see RPE as methodologically consistent with the leading conceptions of evidentiary probabilism, Bayesianism and likelihoodism. Thus, I argue, the best view of the relationship between the approaches is that RPE is a friendly amendment to–because it provides a positive foundation for–probabilism.