Peter Lipton, and Sinnott-Armstrong & Fogelin, construe the argument from silence as an inference to the best explanation

argument-from-silenceabductive-reasoninghistoriographyepistemologymcgrewliptonwaltoninference-to-the-best-explanation

In a footnote to "The Argument from Silence" (2013), Timothy McGrew reports that Peter Lipton, in Inference to the Best Explanation (2nd ed., 2004, p. 116), classifies the argumentum ex silentio as an instance of inference to the best explanation (IBE) — the modern name for reasoning to the most plausible hypothesis given the evidence, traced to Charles Sanders Peirce's abduction. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin reach the same classification independently in Understanding Arguments (8th ed., 2010, pp. 259-60).

McGrew himself adopts neither this label nor Walton's competing one (see claim-walton-classifies-argument-from-silence-as-argument-from-ignorance) in the paper; his own apparatus is the Bayesian notice/record/survive product (claim-mcgrew-argument-from-silence-is-notice-record-survive-product). The footnote instead reports the IBE construal as a live position other philosophers hold, one half of a split the literature has not resolved.

This gives the vault's own recurring negative-finding method — reaching a conclusion from a cited party's silence, as in claim-no-primary-source-documents-ach-abduction-similarity and claim-lucky-widrow-independent-origination-favored-lucky-side-unverified — a name in one strand of the philosophical literature: on Lipton's reading, the argument from silence just is a species of abductive reasoning. See moc-argument-from-silence.