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Understanding

In D. Pritchard S. Berneker (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Routledge (2011)

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  1. Conceptualizing understanding in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI): an abilities-based approach.Timo Speith, Barnaby Crook, Sara Mann, Astrid Schomäcker & Markus Langer - 2024 - Ethics and Information Technology 26 (2):1-15.
    A central goal of research in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is to facilitate human understanding. However, understanding is an elusive concept that is difficult to target. In this paper, we argue that a useful way to conceptualize understanding within the realm of XAI is via certain human abilities. We present four criteria for a useful conceptualization of understanding in XAI and show that these are fulfilled by an abilities-based approach: First, thinking about understanding in terms of specific abilities is motivated (...)
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  • Science and the Public.Angela Potochnik - 2024 - Cambridge University Press.
    Science is a product of society: in its funding, its participation, and its application. This Element explores the relationship between science and the public with resources from philosophy of science. Chapter 1 defines the questions about science's relationship to the public and outlines science's obligation to the public. Chapter 2 considers the Vienna Circle as a case study in how science, philosophy, and the public can relate very differently than they do at present. Chapter 3 examines how public understanding of (...)
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  • Conceptual Baggage and How to Unpack It.Emilia L. Wilson - 2024 - Dissertation, University of St Andrews
    Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...)
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  • What is philosophical progress?Finnur Dellsén, Tina Firing, Insa Lawler & James Norton - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2):663-693.
    What is it for philosophy to make progress? While various putative forms of philosophical progress have been explored in some depth, this overarching question is rarely addressed explicitly, perhaps because it has been assumed to be intractable or unlikely to have a single, unified answer. In this paper, we aim to show that the question is tractable, that it does admit of a single, unified answer, and that one such answer is plausible. This answer is, roughly, that philosophical progress consists (...)
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  • A Phenomenal Theory of Grasping and Understanding.David Bourget - 2025 - In Andrei Ionuț Mărăşoiu & Mircea Dumitru (eds.), Understanding and conscious experience: philosophical and scientific perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.
    There is a difference between merely thinking that P and really grasping that P. For example, Jackson's (1982) black-and-white Mary cannot (before leaving her black-and-white room) fully grasp what it means to say that fire engines are red, but she can perfectly well entertain the thought that fire engines are red. The contrast between merely thinking and grasping is especially salient in the context of certain moral decisions. For example, an individual who grasps the plight of starving children thanks to (...)
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  • Understanding in mathematics: The case of mathematical proofs.Yacin Hamami & Rebecca Lea Morris - 2024 - Noûs 58 (4):1073-1106.
    Although understanding is the object of a growing literature in epistemology and the philosophy of science, only few studies have concerned understanding in mathematics. This essay offers an account of a fundamental form of mathematical understanding: proof understanding. The account builds on a simple idea, namely that understanding a proof amounts to rationally reconstructing its underlying plan. This characterization is fleshed out by specifying the relevant notion of plan and the associated process of rational reconstruction, building in part on Bratman's (...)
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  • Therapeutic Chatbots as Cognitive-Affective Artifacts.J. P. Grodniewicz & Mateusz Hohol - 2024 - Topoi 43 (3):795-807.
    Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) systems (also known as AI “chatbots”) are among the most promising examples of the use of technology in mental health care. With already millions of users worldwide, CAI is likely to change the landscape of psychological help. Most researchers agree that existing CAIs are not “digital therapists” and using them is not a substitute for psychotherapy delivered by a human. But if they are not therapists, what are they, and what role can they play in mental (...)
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  • Axe the X in XAI: A Plea for Understandable AI.Andrés Páez - forthcoming - In Juan Manuel Durán & Giorgia Pozzi (eds.), Philosophy of science for machine learning: Core issues and new perspectives. Springer.
    In a recent paper, Erasmus et al. (2021) defend the idea that the ambiguity of the term “explanation” in explainable AI (XAI) can be solved by adopting any of four different extant accounts of explanation in the philosophy of science: the Deductive Nomological, Inductive Statistical, Causal Mechanical, and New Mechanist models. In this chapter, I show that the authors’ claim that these accounts can be applied to deep neural networks as they would to any natural phenomenon is mistaken. I also (...)
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  • Imagination and Creativity in the Scientific Realm.Alice Murphy - 2024 - In Amy Kind & Julia Langkau (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity. Oxford University Press.
    Historically left to the margins, the topics of imagination and creativity have gained prominence in philosophy of science, challenging the once dominant distinction between ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’. The aim of this chapter is to explore imagination and creativity starting from issues within contemporary philosophy of science, making connections to these topics in other domains along the way. It discusses the recent literature on the role of imagination in models and thought experiments, and their comparison with fictions. (...)
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  • Understanding via exemplification in XAI: how explaining image classification benefits from exemplars.Sara Mann - forthcoming - AI and Society:1-16.
    Artificial intelligent (AI) systems that perform image classification tasks are being used to great success in many application contexts. However, many of these systems are opaque, even to experts. This lack of understanding can be problematic for ethical, legal, or practical reasons. The research field Explainable AI (XAI) has therefore developed several approaches to explain image classifiers. The hope is to bring about understanding, e.g., regarding why certain images are classified as belonging to a particular target class. Most of these (...)
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  • How pluralistic is pluralism really? A case study of Sandra Mitchell’s Integrative Pluralism.Ragnar Van der Merwe - 2023 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 38 (3):319-338.
    Epistemic pluralists in the philosophy of science often argue that different epistemic perspectives in science are equally warranted. Sandra Mitchell – with her Integrative Pluralism (IP) – has notably advocated for this kind of epistemic pluralism. A problem arises for Mitchell however because she also wants to be an epistemological pluralist. She claims that, not only are different epistemic perspectives in science equally warranted in different contexts, but different understandings of these epistemic perspectives in science are also equally warranted in (...)
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  • Why Mary left her room.Michaela M. McSweeney - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1):261-287.
    I argue for an account of grasping, or understanding that, on which we grasp via a higher‐order mental act of Husserlian fulfillment. Fulfillment is the act of matching up the objects of our phenomenally presentational experiences with those of our phenomenally representational thought. Grasping‐by‐fulfilling is importantly different from standard epistemic aims, in part because it is phenomenal rather than inferential. (I endorse Bourget's (2017) arguments to that effect.) I show that grasping‐by‐fulfilling cannot be a species of propositional knowledge or belief, (...)
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  • Autonomy as Practical Understanding.Reza Hadisi - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    In this paper, I offer a theory of autonomous agency that relies on the re-sources of a strongly cognitivist theory of intention and intentional action. On the proposed account, intentional action is a graded notion that is ex-plained via the agent’s degree of practical knowledge. In turn, autonomous agency is also a graded notion that is explained via the agent’s degree of practical understanding. The resulting theory can synthesize insights from both the hierarchical and the cognitivist theories of autonomy with (...)
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  • Artificial understanding: a step toward robust AI.Erez Firt - forthcoming - AI and Society:1-13.
    In recent years, state-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems have started to show signs of what might be seen as human level intelligence. More specifically, large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3, and more recently Google’s PaLM and DeepMind’s GATO, are performing amazing feats involving the generation of texts. However, it is acknowledged by many researchers that contemporary language models, and more generally, learning systems, still lack important capabilities, such as understanding, reasoning and the ability to employ knowledge of the world and (...)
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  • Hot-cold empathy gaps and the grounds of authenticity.Grace Helton & Christopher Register - 2023 - Synthese 202 (5):1-24.
    Hot-cold empathy gaps are a pervasive phenomena wherein one’s predictions about others tend to skew ‘in the direction’ of one’s own current visceral states. For instance, when one predicts how hungry someone else is, one’s prediction will tend to reflect one’s own current hunger state. These gaps also obtain intrapersonally, when one attempts to predict what one oneself would do at a different time. In this paper, we do three things: We draw on empirical evidence to argue that so-called hot-cold (...)
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  • Understanding phenomena: From social to collective?Federica Isabella Malfatti - 2022 - Philosophical Issues (1):253-267.
    In making sense of the world, we typically cooperate, join forces, and draw on one another’s competence and expertise. A group or community in which there is a well-functioning division of cognitive-epistemic labor can achieve levels of understanding that a single agent who relies exclusively on her own capacities would probably never achieve. However, is understanding also collective? I.e., is understanding something that can be possessed by a group or community rather than by individuals? In this paper, I develop an (...)
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  • Verstehen verstehen. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Untersuchung.Federica Isabella Malfatti - 2022 - Berlin, Deutschland: Schwabe Verlag.
    Wir Menschen streben danach, die Wirklichkeit zu verstehen. Eine Welt, die wir gut verstehen, ist eine, die wir "im Griff" haben, mit der wir gut umgehen können. Aber was heißt es genau, ein Phänomen der Wirklichkeit zu verstehen? Wie sieht unser Weltbild aus, wenn wir ein Phänomen verstanden haben? Welche Bedingungen müssen erfüllt sein, damit Verstehen gelingt? Die Kernthese des Buches ist, dass wir Phänomene der Wirklichkeit durch noetische Integration verstehen. Wir verstehen Phänomene, indem wir den entsprechenden Informationseinheiten eine sinnvolle (...)
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  • Varieties of Metaphysical Coherentism.Jan Swiderski - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (5):1861-1886.
    According to metaphysical coherentism, grounding relations form an interconnected system in which things ground each other and nothing is ungrounded. This potentially viable view’s logical territory remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I describe that territory by articulating four varieties of metaphysical coherentism. I do not argue for any variety in particular. Rather, I aim to show that not all issues which might be raised against coherentism will be equally problematic for all the versions of that view, which features far (...)
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  • Would Disagreement Undermine Progress?Finnur Dellsén, Insa Lawler & James Norton - 2023 - Journal of Philosophy 120 (3):139-172.
    In recent years, several philosophers have argued that their discipline makes no progress (or not enough in comparison to the “hard sciences”). A key argument for this pessimistic position appeals to the purported fact that philosophers widely and systematically disagree on most major philosophical issues. In this paper, we take a step back from the debate about progress in philosophy specifically and consider the general question: How (if at all) would disagreement within a discipline undermine that discipline’s progress? We reject (...)
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  • Intellectual virtue and its role in epistemology.Duncan Pritchard - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):1-20.
    An overview is presented of what I take to be the role of the intellectual virtues within the epistemological enterprise. Traditionally, the theory of knowledge has been thought to be central to the epistemological project, but since, as I explain, the intellectual virtues aren’t required for knowledge, this might suggest that they have only a marginal role to play in epistemological debates. I argue against this suggestion by showing how the intellectual virtues are in fact crucial to several core epistemological (...)
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  • Integrating Philosophy of Understanding with the Cognitive Sciences.Kareem Khalifa, Farhan Islam, J. P. Gamboa, Daniel Wilkenfeld & Daniel Kostić - 2022 - Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 16.
    We provide two programmatic frameworks for integrating philosophical research on understanding with complementary work in computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. First, philosophical theories of understanding have consequences about how agents should reason if they are to understand that can then be evaluated empirically by their concordance with findings in scientific studies of reasoning. Second, these studies use a multitude of explanations, and a philosophical theory of understanding is well suited to integrating these explanations in illuminating ways.
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  • (1 other version)Constitutivism about Reasons: Autonomy and Understanding.Karl Schafer - 2018 - In Karen Jones & François Schroeter (eds.), The Many Moral Rationalisms. New York: Oxford Univerisity Press.
    Contemporary forms of Kantian constitutivism generally begin with a conception of agency on which the constitutive aim of agency is some form of autonomy or self-unification. This chapter argues for a re-orientation of the Kantian constitutivist project towards views that begin with a conception of rationality on which both theoretical and practical rationality aim at forms of understanding. In a slogan, then, understanding-first as opposed to autonomy-first constitutivism. Such a view gives the constitutivist new resources for explaining many classes of (...)
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  • Appreciation as an Epistemic Emotion.Dong An - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (2):249-264.
    In this paper, I develop an account of appreciation. I argue that appreciation is an epistemic emotion in which the subject grasps the object in an affective way. The “grasping” and “feeling” components implies that in appreciation, we make sense of the object by having cognitive control over it, are motivated to maintain the valuable epistemic state of understanding, and experience the “aha” or “eureka” moment. This account offers a unified account of the many types of appreciation, including the aesthetic, (...)
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  • Understanding and Testimony.Allan Hazlett - 2024 - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
    Can understanding be transmitted by testimony, in the same sense that propositional knowledge can be transmitted by testimony? Some contemporary philosophers – call them testimonial understanding pessimists – say No, and others – call them testimonial understanding optimists – say Yes. In this chapter I will articulate testimonial understanding pessimism (§1) and consider some arguments for it (§2).
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  • Grounding and a priori epistemology: challenges for conceptualism.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4).
    Traditional rationalist approaches to a priori epistemology have long been looked upon with suspicion for positing a faculty of rational intuition capable of knowing truths about the world apart from experience. Conceptualists have tried to fill this void with something more empirically tractable, arguing that we know a priori truths due to our understanding of concepts. All of this theorizing, however, has carried on while neglecting an entire cross section of such truths, the grounding claims that we know a priori. (...)
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  • Opacity thought through: on the intransparency of computer simulations.Claus Beisbart - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11643-11666.
    Computer simulations are often claimed to be opaque and thus to lack transparency. But what exactly is the opacity of simulations? This paper aims to answer that question by proposing an explication of opacity. Such an explication is needed, I argue, because the pioneering definition of opacity by P. Humphreys and a recent elaboration by Durán and Formanek are too narrow. While it is true that simulations are opaque in that they include too many computations and thus cannot be checked (...)
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  • Hempel on Scientific Understanding.Xingming Hu - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (8):164-171.
    Hempel seems to hold the following three views: (H1) Understanding is pragmatic/relativistic: Whether one understands why X happened in terms of Explanation E depends on one's beliefs and cognitive abilities; (H2) Whether a scientific explanation is good, just like whether a mathematical proof is good, is a nonpragmatic and objective issue independent of the beliefs or cognitive abilities of individuals; (H3) The goal of scientific explanation is understanding: A good scientific explanation is the one that provides understanding. Apparently, H1, H2, (...)
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  • The multifaceted role of imagination in science and religion. A critical examination of its epistemic, creative and meaning-making functions.Ingrid Malm Lindberg - 2021 - Dissertation, Uppsala University
    The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine critically and discuss the role of imagination in science and religion, with particular emphasis on its possible epistemic, creative, and meaning-making functions. In order to answer my research questions, I apply theories and concepts from contemporary philosophy of mind on scientific and religious practices. This framework allows me to explore the mental state of imagination, not as an isolated phenomenon but, rather, as one of many mental states that co-exist and interplay (...)
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  • The Mark of Understanding: In Defense of an Ability Account.Sven Delarivière & Bart Van Kerkhove - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (5):619-648.
    Understanding is a valued trait in any epistemic practice, scientific or not. Yet, when it comes to characterizing its nature, the notion has not received the philosophical attention it deserves. We have set ourselves three tasks in this paper. First, we defend the importance of this endeavor. Second, we consider and criticize a number of proposals to this effect. Third, we defend an alternative account, focusing on abilities as the proper mark of understanding.
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  • Understanding a communicated thought.J. Adam Carter, Emma Gordon & J. P. Grodniewicz - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):12137-12151.
    The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that the understanding one has of a proposition or a propositional content of a representational vehicle is a species of what contemporary epistemologists characterise as objectual understanding. Second, we demonstrate that even though this type of understanding differs from linguistic understanding, in many instances of successful communication, these two types of understanding jointly contribute to understanding a communicated thought.
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  • The Pragmatic Turn in Explainable Artificial Intelligence.Andrés Páez - 2019 - Minds and Machines 29 (3):441-459.
    In this paper I argue that the search for explainable models and interpretable decisions in AI must be reformulated in terms of the broader project of offering a pragmatic and naturalistic account of understanding in AI. Intuitively, the purpose of providing an explanation of a model or a decision is to make it understandable to its stakeholders. But without a previous grasp of what it means to say that an agent understands a model or a decision, the explanatory strategies will (...)
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  • Properties in sight and in thought.Ivan V. Ivanov - 2019 - Synthese 198 (8):7049-7071.
    The main focus of acquaintance theorists has been the nature and mechanism of perceptual acquaintance with particulars. Generally, one’s view of perceptual acquaintance with general features has taken its bearings from one’s view of perceptual acquaintance with particulars. This has led to the glossing over of significant differences in the mechanisms of perceptual acquaintance with particulars and with general features. The difference in mechanisms suggests a difference in the sort of epistemic state at play in the two kinds of cases. (...)
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  • In what sense is understanding an intellectual virtue?Xingming Hu - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5883-5895.
    In this paper, I distinguish between two senses of “understanding”: understanding as an epistemic good and understanding as a character trait or a distinctive power of the mind. I argue that understanding as a character trait or a distinctive power of the mind is an intellectual virtue while understanding as an epistemic good is not. Finally, I show how the distinction can help us better appreciate Aristotle’s account of intellectual virtue.
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  • Rational understanding: toward a probabilistic epistemology of acceptability.Finnur Dellsén - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):2475-2494.
    To understand something involves some sort of commitment to a set of propositions comprising an account of the understood phenomenon. Some take this commitment to be a species of belief; others, such as Elgin and I, take it to be a kind of cognitive policy. This paper takes a step back from debates about the nature of understanding and asks when this commitment involved in understanding is epistemically appropriate, or ‘acceptable’ in Elgin’s terminology. In particular, appealing to lessons from the (...)
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  • Basic Action and Practical Knowledge.Will Small - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    It is a commonplace in philosophy of action that there is and must be teleologically basic action: something done on an occasion without doing it by means of doing anything else. It is widely believed that basic actions are exercises of skill. As the source of the need for basic action is the structure of practical reasoning, this yields a conception of skill and practical reasoning as complementary but mutually exclusive. On this view, practical reasoning and complex intentional action depend (...)
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  • Kornblith versus Sosa on grades of knowledge.J. Adam Carter & Robin McKenna - 2019 - Synthese 196 (12):4989-5007.
    In a series of works Sosa (in: Knowledge in perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991; A virtue epistemology: apt belief and reflective knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; Reflective knowledge: apt belief and reflective knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009; ‘How Competence Matters in Epistemology’, Philos Perspect 24(1):465–475, 2010; Knowing full well, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2011; Judgment and agency, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015; Epistemology, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2017) has defended the view that there are two kinds or (...)
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  • Understanding why, knowing why, and cognitive achievements.Insa Lawler - 2019 - Synthese 196 (11):4583-4603.
    Duncan Pritchard argues that a feature that sets understanding-why apart from knowledge-why is that whereas (I) understanding-why is a kind of cognitive achievement in a strong sense, (II) knowledge-why is not such a kind. I argue that (I) is false and that (II) is true. (I) is false because understanding-why featuring rudimentary explanations and understanding-why concerning very simple causal connections are not cognitive achievements in a strong sense. Knowledge-why is not a kind of cognitive achievement in a strong sense for (...)
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  • Moral Testimony: A Re-Conceived Understanding Explanation.Laura Callahan - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (272):437-459.
    Why is there a felt asymmetry between cases in which agents defer to testifiers for certain moral beliefs, and cases in which agents defer on many other matters? One explanation influential in the literature is that having understanding of a proposition is both in tension with acquiring belief in the proposition by deferring to another's testimony and distinctively important when it comes to moral propositions, as compared with what we might think of as many ‘garden variety’ facts. My project in (...)
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  • Understanding as an Intellectual Virtue.Stephen Grimm - 2019 - In Battaly Heather (ed.), Routledge Companion to Virtue Epistemology. Routledge.
    In this paper I elucidate various ways in which understanding can be seen as an excellence of the mind or intellectual virtue. Along the way, I take up the neglected issue of what it might mean to be an “understanding person”—by which I mean not a person who understands a number of things about the natural world, but a person who steers clear of things like judgmentalism in her evaluation of other people, and thus is better able to take up (...)
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  • Why Study History? On Its Epistemic Benefits and Its Relation to the Sciences.Stephen R. Grimm - 2017 - Philosophy 92 (3):399-420.
    I try to return the focus of the philosophy of history to the nature of understanding, with a particular emphasis on Louis Mink’s project of exploring how historical understanding compares to the understanding we find in the natural sciences. On the whole, I come to a conclusion that Mink almost certainly would not have liked: that the understanding offered by history has a very similar epistemic profile to the understanding offered by the sciences, a similarity that stems from the fact (...)
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  • What is Understanding? An Overview of Recent Debates in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science.Christoph Baumberger, Claus Beisbart & Georg Brun - 2017 - In Stephen Grimm Christoph Baumberger & Sabine Ammon (eds.), Explaining Understanding: New Perspectives from Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Routledge. pp. 1-34.
    The paper provides a systematic overview of recent debates in epistemology and philosophy of science on the nature of understanding. We explain why philosophers have turned their attention to understanding and discuss conditions for “explanatory” understanding of why something is the case and for “objectual” understanding of a whole subject matter. The most debated conditions for these types of understanding roughly resemble the three traditional conditions for knowledge: truth, justification and belief. We discuss prominent views about how to construe these (...)
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  • Understanding and Coming to Understand.Michael Lynch - 2017 - In Stephen Robert Grimm (ed.), Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
    Many philosophers take understanding to be a distinctive kind of knowledge that involves grasping dependency relations; moreover, they hold it to be particularly valuable. This paper aims to investigate and address two well-known puzzles that arise from this conception: (1) the nature of understanding itself—in particular, the nature of “grasping”; (2) the source of understanding’s distinctive value. In what follows, I’ll argue that we can shed light on both puzzles by recognizing first, the importance of the distinction between the act (...)
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  • The Epistemology of Cognitive Enhancement.J. Adam Carter & Duncan Pritchard - 2016 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy (2):220-242.
    A common epistemological assumption in contemporary bioethics held b y both proponents and critics of non-traditional forms of cognitive enhancement is that cognitive enhancement aims at the facilitation of the accumulation of human knowledge. This paper does three central things. First, drawing from recent work in epistemology, a rival account of cognitive enhancement, framed in terms of the notion of cognitive achievement rather than knowledge, is proposed. Second, we outline and respond to an axiological objection to our proposal that draws (...)
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  • Scientific progress: Knowledge versus understanding.Finnur Dellsén - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 56 (C):72-83.
    What is scientific progress? On Alexander Bird’s epistemic account of scientific progress, an episode in science is progressive precisely when there is more scientific knowledge at the end of the episode than at the beginning. Using Bird’s epistemic account as a foil, this paper develops an alternative understanding-based account on which an episode in science is progressive precisely when scientists grasp how to correctly explain or predict more aspects of the world at the end of the episode than at the (...)
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  • The Role of Consciousness in Grasping and Understanding.David Bourget - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (2):285-318.
    One sometimes believes a proposition without grasping it. For example, a complete achromat might believe that ripe tomatoes are red without grasping this proposition. My aim in this paper is to shed light on the difference between merely believing a proposition and grasping it. I focus on two possible theories of grasping: the inferential theory, which explains grasping in terms of inferential role, and the phenomenal theory, which explains grasping in terms of phenomenal consciousness. I argue that the phenomenal theory (...)
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  • The diverse aims of science.Angela Potochnik - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 53:71-80.
    There is increasing attention to the centrality of idealization in science. One common view is that models and other idealized representations are important to science, but that they fall short in one or more ways. On this view, there must be an intermediary step between idealized representation and the traditional aims of science, including truth, explanation, and prediction. Here I develop an alternative interpretation of the relationship between idealized representation and the aims of science. In my view, continuing, widespread idealization (...)
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  • Wisdom in Theology.Stephen R. Grimm - forthcoming - In William and Frederick Abraham and Aquino (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology.
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  • Wisdom.Stephen R. Grimm - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1):1-16.
    What is it that makes someone wise, or one person wiser than another? I argue that wisdom consists in knowledge of how to live well, and that this knowledge of how to live well is constituted by various further kinds of knowledge. One concern for this view is that knowledge is not needed for wisdom but rather some state short of knowledge, such as having rational or justified beliefs about various topics. Another concern is that the emphasis on knowing how (...)
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  • Is There Propositional Understanding?Emma C. Gordon - 2012 - Logos and Episteme 3 (2):181-192.
    Literature in epistemology tends to suppose that there are three main types of understanding – propositional, atomistic, and objectual. By showing that all apparent instances of propositional understanding can be more plausibly explained as featuring one of several other epistemic states, this paper argues that talk of propositional understanding is unhelpful and misleading. The upshot is that epistemologists can do without the notion of propositional understanding.
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  • A new maneuver against the epistemic relativist.J. Adam Carter & Emma C. Gordon - 2014 - Synthese 191 (8).
    Epistemic relativists often appeal to an epistemic incommensurability thesis. One notable example is the position advanced by Wittgenstein in On certainty (1969). However, Ian Hacking’s radical denial of the possibility of objective epistemic reasons for belief poses, we suggest, an even more forceful challenge to mainstream meta-epistemology. Our central objective will be to develop a novel strategy for defusing Hacking’s line of argument. Specifically, we show that the epistemic incommensurability thesis can be resisted even if we grant the very insights (...)
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