Lovely and likely: using historical methods to improve inference to the best explanation in strategy

Many strategy studies implicitly rely upon inference to the best explanation (IBE) or modern abduction. We leverage recent work in the philosophy of science to consider how we arrive at best explanations, explanations that are lovely, in the sense that they are useful, general, and provide meaning, and likely, in the sense that they are close to the truth. Interpretation of observational results requires an understanding of context that statistical analysis alone cannot provide. At that point of encounter, historical methods (hermeneutics, contextualization and source criticism) can improve IBE by helping scholars (1) generate new candidate explanations and (2) systematically judge, privilege, and balance the explanatory virtues that constitute the loveliness and likeliness of explanations.