This brief concluding chapter provides a broad brush summary of the book. If historians and philosophers of science are interested in how scientists confirm compositional hypotheses, then an important resource is the scientific literature wherein scientists appeal to experimental results. This is where the theory of singular compositional abduction provides a novel account. The book ends on a note about the incompleteness of the theory. For one thing, the theory does not provide an account of how functional magnetic resonance imaging might be used to confirm compositional hypotheses.

This chapter contrasts the theory of singular compositional abduction with Gilbert Harman’s picture of inference to the best explanation. Most notably, Harman’s work is meant to argue that warranted enumerative induction is a special case of inference to the best explanation. It is not, in the first instance, a theory of the scientific interpretation of experimental results. A key element in Harman’s inference to the best explanation is that it is a matter of warranted abductive inference. In trying to understand the scientific interpretation of a single experimental result, one should not assume a priori that an abductive interpretation is warranted. Instead, one should allow that the warrant for some hypothesis only emerges, if it ever does, over the course of a prolonged period of scientific investigation.