Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

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And so on. My point is that, given an intention to get fresh air, there are
ways in which we might expect Sally to act. By reconstructing how Sally
might reason in this situation, you can seek corroboration of your original
conjecture.
A.3.5 FALSIFICATION AND FAILURE
At this point, I can make one concession to critics of intentional explanations.
It is true that, strictly speaking, no intentional explanation is falsifi
ed by the failure of a single prediction. For any intentional explanation
will have ceteris paribus clauses, and other things may not be equal. One
might argue that intentional explanations are not alone in this respect, for
most explanations, even those in the natural sciences, also employ ceteris
paribus clauses. 74 But let me rest content with the assertion that this is true
of intentional explanations. There can always be some confounding factor
that prevents the expected result. Sally’s failure to open the window, for
example, does not necessarily mean that our original hypothesis—that she
intends to get fresh air—was false.
But does this mean that intentional explanations cannot be tested? No, it
does not. We might, for instance, observe some further action that could be
explained only by positing a new intention, one that is apparently incompatible
with our original posit. Let’s say, for instance, you were to observe
Sally turn off the air conditioning or (being a non-smoker herself) invite
her colleagues to light cigarettes. Whatever we suggest is motivating these
actions, it seems incompatible with the idea that Sally is wanting fresh air.
If such actions do not, strictly speaking, falsify our original hypothesis,
they certainly constitute strong evidence against it.
Even in the absence of such evidence, a failure to make successful predictions
will count against our proposed explanation. If we explain this
failure by positing some confounding factor, then the onus is on us to produce
(more or less) independent evidence of its existence. If we cannot,
then the most defensible course of action would be to seek an alternative
explanation of Sally’s actions. If our new hypothesis receives corroboration
where our initial conjecture does not, then it represents a more successful
research programme—if I may use this term of so everyday and informal a
process—which should be adopted. If we were motivated enough to explain
Sally’s actions, this is surely how we would reason. And it seems a perfectly
defensible way of explaining human behaviour, or, for that matter,
the behaviour of any rational agent.