In Japan, despite its popularity in natural science and philosophy, Inference to the Best Explanation is generally considered as an argument for scientific realism rather than as a method of philosophy. This paper aims to marshal some relevant topics in dispute and defend IBE against its critics. The distinct feature of IBE is that it considers simplicity and fruitfulness as theoretical virtues. This character makes IBE useful as a common method of philosophical inquiry. In conclusion, IBE is tenable as a heuristic to identify a working hypothesis, at least.

    Emergence in physics has been defined in several manners, but these definitions face some challenges. The aim of this paper is to propose a new definition of emergence as a relationship between models and overcome these problems. For this purpose, I will focus on the case of the renormalization group (RG) method, because the RG method has been considered as an instance of emergence in physics and the features of models in the RG method are revealed through the notion of minimal model. In order to highlight the key feature of the minimal model, the notion of a generalized model is introduced. The definition of emergence will be proposed by comparing the minimal model with the generalized model.

    Information flow has been extensively discussed. There are various kinds of information flow in the environment. By using them, we produce and use information. In this paper, we first present the fundamental idea of J. Barwise and J. Seligman’s information flow. On the other hand, the area of philosophy of information is also remarkably developed. In particular, we focus on the method of Level of Abstraction (LoA) introduced by L. Floridi. The method of LoA allows us to extract suitable information from some systems. Combining the concepts of information flow and LoA, we can significantly understand these concepts.