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Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (2017)

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  1. 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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  • Scientific Understanding: What It Is and How It Is Achieved.Anna Elisabeth Höhl - 2024 - transcript Verlag.
    Understanding is an ability manifested by grasping relations of a phenomenon and articulating new explanations. Hence, scientific understanding is inextricably intertwined with and not possible without explanation, and understanding is not a type of propositional knowledge. Anna Elisabeth Höhl provides a novel philosophical account of scientific understanding by developing and defending necessary and sufficient conditions for the understanding that scientists achieve of the phenomena they are researching. This account of scientific understanding is based on and supported by a detailed investigation (...)
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  • Explanation Hacking: The perils of algorithmic recourse.E. Sullivan & Atoosa Kasirzadeh - forthcoming - In Juan Manuel Durán & Giorgia Pozzi (eds.), Philosophy of science for machine learning: Core issues and new perspectives. Springer.
    We argue that the trend toward providing users with feasible and actionable explanations of AI decisions—known as recourse explanations—comes with ethical downsides. Specifically, we argue that recourse explanations face several conceptual pitfalls and can lead to problematic explanation hacking, which undermines their ethical status. As an alternative, we advocate that explanations of AI decisions should aim at understanding.
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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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  • 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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  • Probabilifying reflective equilibrium.Finnur Dellsén - 2024 - Synthese 203 (2):1-24.
    This paper aims to flesh out the celebrated notion of reflective equilibrium within a probabilistic framework for epistemic rationality. On the account developed here, an agent's attitudes are in reflective equilibrium when there is a certain sort of harmony between the agent's credences, on the one hand, and what the agent accepts, on the other hand. Somewhat more precisely, reflective equilibrium is taken to consist in the agent accepting, or being prepared to accept, all and only claims that follow from (...)
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  • Machine understanding and deep learning representation.Elay Shech & Michael Tamir - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-27.
    Practical ability manifested through robust and reliable task performance, as well as information relevance and well-structured representation, are key factors indicative of understanding in the philosophical literature. We explore these factors in the context of deep learning, identifying prominent patterns in how the results of these algorithms represent information. While the estimation applications of modern neural networks do not qualify as the mental activity of persons, we argue that coupling analyses from philosophical accounts with the empirical and theoretical basis for (...)
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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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  • Symmetry and Reformulation: On Intellectual Progress in Science and Mathematics.Josh Hunt - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Michigan
    Science and mathematics continually change in their tools, methods, and concepts. Many of these changes are not just modifications but progress---steps to be admired. But what constitutes progress? This dissertation addresses one central source of intellectual advancement in both disciplines: reformulating a problem-solving plan into a new, logically compatible one. For short, I call these cases of compatible problem-solving plans "reformulations." Two aspects of reformulations are puzzling. First, reformulating is often unnecessary. Given that we could already solve a problem using (...)
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  • Should friends and frenemies of understanding be friends? Discussing de Regt.Kareem Khalifa - 2022 - In Insa Lawler, Kareem Khalifa & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. New York, NY: Routledge.
    In earlier work, I criticized de Regt’s contextual theory of understanding, and advertised the advantages of my own, knowledge-based account. Using the early history of the standard model in particle physics as an illustration, I instead consider the benefits of unifying these two accounts of understanding. I argue that de Regt’s account substantially improves my own account of explanatory consideration, and that my account of explanatory comparison substantially improves upon his account of explanatory evaluation. De Regt and my apparent disagreement (...)
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  • Mathematical and Non-causal Explanations: an Introduction.Daniel Kostić - 2019 - Perspectives on Science 1 (27):1-6.
    In the last couple of years, a few seemingly independent debates on scientific explanation have emerged, with several key questions that take different forms in different areas. For example, the questions what makes an explanation distinctly mathematical and are there any non-causal explanations in sciences (i.e., explanations that don’t cite causes in the explanans) sometimes take a form of the question of what makes mathematical models explanatory, especially whether highly idealized models in science can be explanatory and in virtue of (...)
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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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  • Framing the Epistemic Schism of Statistical Mechanics.Javier Anta - 2021 - Proceedings of the X Conference of the Spanish Society of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science.
    In this talk I present the main results from Anta (2021), namely, that the theoretical division between Boltzmannian and Gibbsian statistical mechanics should be understood as a separation in the epistemic capabilities of this physical discipline. In particular, while from the Boltzmannian framework one can generate powerful explanations of thermal processes by appealing to their microdynamics, from the Gibbsian framework one can predict observable values in a computationally effective way. Finally, I argue that this statistical mechanical schism contradicts the Hempelian (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Scientific Progress Without Justification.Finnur Dellsén - 2022 - In Insa Lawler, Kareem Khalifa & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. New York, NY: Routledge.
    According to some prominent accounts of scientific progress, e.g. Bird’s epistemic account, accepting new theories is progressive only if the theories are justified in the sense required for knowledge. This paper argues that epistemic justification requirements of this sort should be rejected because they misclassify many paradigmatic instances of scientific progress as non-progressive. In particular, scientific progress would be implausibly rare in cases where (a) scientists are aware that most or all previous theories in some domain have turned out to (...)
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  • Two Dimensions of Opacity and the Deep Learning Predicament.Florian J. Boge - 2021 - Minds and Machines 32 (1):43-75.
    Deep neural networks have become increasingly successful in applications from biology to cosmology to social science. Trained DNNs, moreover, correspond to models that ideally allow the prediction of new phenomena. Building in part on the literature on ‘eXplainable AI’, I here argue that these models are instrumental in a sense that makes them non-explanatory, and that their automated generation is opaque in a unique way. This combination implies the possibility of an unprecedented gap between discovery and explanation: When unsupervised models (...)
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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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  • Understanding scientific progress: the noetic account.Finnur Dellsén - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11249-11278.
    What is scientific progress? This paper advances an interpretation of this question, and an account that serves to answer it. Roughly, the question is here understood to concern what type of cognitive change with respect to a topic X constitutes a scientific improvement with respect to X. The answer explored in the paper is that the requisite type of cognitive change occurs when scientific results are made publicly available so as to make it possible for anyone to increase their understanding (...)
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  • Understanding realism.Collin Rice - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4097-4121.
    Catherine Elgin has recently argued that a nonfactive conception of understanding is required to accommodate the epistemic successes of science that make essential use of idealizations and models. In this paper, I argue that the fact that our best scientific models and theories are pervasively inaccurate representations can be made compatible with a more nuanced form of scientific realism that I call Understanding Realism. According to this view, science aims at (and often achieves) factive scientific understanding of natural phenomena. I (...)
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  • Thinking about Progress: From Science to Philosophy.Finnur Dellsén, Insa Lawler & James Norton - 2022 - Noûs 56 (4):814-840.
    Is there progress in philosophy? If so, how much? Philosophers have recently argued for a wide range of answers to these questions, from the view that there is no progress whatsoever to the view that philosophy has provided answers to all the big philosophical questions. However, these views are difficult to compare and evaluate, because they rest on very different assumptions about the conditions under which philosophy would make progress. This paper looks to the comparatively mature debate about scientific progress (...)
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  • (1 other version)We Owe It to Others to Think for Ourselves.Finnur Dellsén - 2021 - In Jonathan Matheson & Kirk Lougheed (eds.), Epistemic Autonomy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 306-322.
    We are often urged to figure things out for ourselves rather than to rely on other people’s say-so, and thus be ‘epistemically autonomous’ in one sense of the term. But why? For almost any important question, there will be someone around you who is at least as well placed to answer it correctly. So why bother making up your own mind at all? I consider, and then reject, two ‘egoistic’ answers to this question according to which thinking for oneself is (...)
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  • The Truth About Better Understanding?Lewis Ross - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (2):747-770.
    The notion of understanding occupies an increasingly prominent place in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of science, and moral theory. A central and ongoing debate about the nature of understanding is how it relates to the truth. In a series of influential contributions, Catherine Elgin has used a variety of familiar motivations for antirealism in philosophy of science to defend a non- factive theory of understanding. Key to her position are: (i) the fact that false theories can contribute to the upwards trajectory (...)
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  • Щодо пояснення та розуміння в сучасній англомовній філософії.Mykola Bakaiev - 2021 - Наукові Записки Наукма. Філософія Та Релігієзнавство 6:81-88.
    Understanding and explanation are usually considered in the context of continental philosophy in Ukraine, based on Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinction between understanding and explanation as the opposite methods for humanities and natural science respectively as well as relying heavily on hermeneutical philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer when it comes to understanding. However, this is not an exclusive feature of continental philosophy, and this article aims to show that the terms are actively used in English-speaking philosophy. This is done by (...)
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  • What is Interpretability?Adrian Erasmus, Tyler D. P. Brunet & Eyal Fisher - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology 34:833–862.
    We argue that artificial networks are explainable and offer a novel theory of interpretability. Two sets of conceptual questions are prominent in theoretical engagements with artificial neural networks, especially in the context of medical artificial intelligence: Are networks explainable, and if so, what does it mean to explain the output of a network? And what does it mean for a network to be interpretable? We argue that accounts of “explanation” tailored specifically to neural networks have ineffectively reinvented the wheel. In (...)
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  • Prediction versus understanding in computationally enhanced neuroscience.Mazviita Chirimuuta - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):767-790.
    The use of machine learning instead of traditional models in neuroscience raises significant questions about the epistemic benefits of the newer methods. I draw on the literature on model intelligibility in the philosophy of science to offer some benchmarks for the interpretability of artificial neural networks used as a predictive tool in neuroscience. Following two case studies on the use of ANN’s to model motor cortex and the visual system, I argue that the benefit of providing the scientist with understanding (...)
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  • Simplicity of what? A case study from generative linguistics.Giulia Terzian & María Inés Corbalán - 2020 - Synthese 198 (10):9427-9452.
    The Minimalist Program in generative linguistics is predicated on the idea that simplicity is a defining property of the human language faculty, on the one hand; on the other, a central aim of linguistic theorising. Worryingly, however, justifications for either claim are hard to come by in the literature. We sketch a proposal that would allow for both shortcomings to be addressed, and that furthermore honours the program’s declared commitment to naturalism. We begin by teasing apart and clarifying the different (...)
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  • Group understanding.Kenneth Boyd - 2019 - Synthese 198 (7):6837-6858.
    While social epistemologists have recently begun addressing questions about whether groups can possess beliefs or knowledge, little has yet been said about whether groups can properly be said to possess understanding. Here I want to make some progress on this question by considering two possible accounts of group understanding, modeled on accounts of group belief and knowledge: a deflationary account, according to which a group understands just in case most or all of its members understand, and an inflationary account, according (...)
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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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  • Books Received. [REVIEW][author unknown] - 2019 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (1):125-130.
    The following books have been received and many of them are still available for review. Interested reviewers please contact the reviews editor: [email protected], P. 2018. Philosophy in the H...
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  • Understanding as compression.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (10):2807-2831.
    What is understanding? My goal in this paper is to lay out a new approach to this question and clarify how that approach deals with certain issues. The claim is that understanding is a matter of compressing information about the understood so that it can be mentally useful. On this account, understanding amounts to having a representational kernel and the ability to use it to generate the information one needs regarding the target phenomenon. I argue that this ambitious new account (...)
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  • Explanation classification depends on understanding: extending the epistemic side-effect effect.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld & Tania Lombrozo - 2020 - Synthese 197 (6):2565-2592.
    Our goal in this paper is to experimentally investigate whether folk conceptions of explanation are psychologistic. In particular, are people more likely to classify speech acts as explanations when they cause understanding in their recipient? The empirical evidence that we present suggests this is so. Using the side-effect effect as a marker of mental state ascriptions, we argue that lay judgments of explanatory status are mediated by judgments of a speaker’s and/or audience’s mental states. First, we show that attributions of (...)
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  • Realism and Explanatory Perspectivism.Juha Saatsi - 2019 - In Michela Massimi & Casey D. Mccoy (eds.), Understanding Perspectivism (Open Access): Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects. New York, NY, USA: Routledge.
    This chapter defends a (minimal) realist conception of progress in scientific understanding in the face of the ubiquitous plurality of perspectives in science. The argument turns on the counterfactual-dependence framework of explanation and understanding, which is illustrated and evidenced with reference to different explanations of the rainbow.
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  • Minimal structure explanations, scientific understanding and explanatory depth.Daniel Kostić - 2018 - Perspectives on Science (1):48-67.
    In this paper, I outline a heuristic for thinking about the relation between explanation and understanding that can be used to capture various levels of “intimacy”, between them. I argue that the level of complexity in the structure of explanation is inversely proportional to the level of intimacy between explanation and understanding, i.e. the more complexity the less intimacy. I further argue that the level of complexity in the structure of explanation also affects the explanatory depth in a similar way (...)
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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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  • Health Digital Twins, Legal Liability, and Medical Practice.Andreas Kuersten - 2023 - American Journal of Bioethics 23 (9):66-69.
    Digital twins for health care have the potential to significantly impact the provision of medical services. In addition to possible use in care, this technology could serve as a conduit by which no...
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  • (1 other version)Understanding in Medicine.Varga Somogy - 2023 - Erkenntnis (8):3025-3049.
    This paper aims to clarify the nature of understanding in medicine. The first part describes in more detail what it means to understand something and links a type of understanding (i.e., objectual understanding) to explanations. The second part proceeds to investigate what objectual understanding of a disease (i.e., biomedical understanding) requires by considering the case of scurvy from the history of medi- cine. The main hypothesis is that grasping a mechanistic explanation of a condi- tion is necessary for a biomedical (...)
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  • Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science.Holly Andersen - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (3):499-503.
    A critical review of Collin Rice's book, Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science.
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  • The rational dimension of understanding.Miloud Belkoniene - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-16.
    It is natural to regard understanding as having a rational dimension, in the sense that understanding seems to require having justification for holding certain beliefs about the world. Some philosophers however argue that justification is not required to gain understanding of phenomena. In the present paper, my intention is to provide a critical examination of the arguments that have been offered against the view that understanding requires justification in order to show that, contrary to what they purport to establish, justification (...)
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  • Why understanding-why is contrastive.Miguel Egler - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6061-6083.
    Contrastivism about interrogative understanding is the view that ‘S understands why p’ posits a three-place epistemic relation between a subject S, a fact p, and an alternative to p, q. This thesis stands in stark opposition to the natural idea that a subject S can be said to understand why psimpliciter. I argue that contrastivism offers the best explanation for the fact that evaluations of the form ‘S understands why p’ vary depending on the alternatives to p under consideration. I (...)
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  • Scientific understanding and felicitous legitimate falsehoods.Insa Lawler - 2021 - Synthese 198 (7):6859-6887.
    Science is replete with falsehoods that epistemically facilitate understanding by virtue of being the very falsehoods they are. In view of this puzzling fact, some have relaxed the truth requirement on understanding. I offer a factive view of understanding that fully accommodates the puzzling fact in four steps: (i) I argue that the question how these falsehoods are related to the phenomenon to be understood and the question how they figure into the content of understanding it are independent. (ii) I (...)
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  • Veritism refuted? Understanding, idealization, and the facts.Tamer Nawar - 2021 - Synthese 198 (5):4295-4313.
    Elgin offers an influential and far-reaching challenge to veritism. She takes scientific understanding to be non-factive and maintains that there are epistemically useful falsehoods that figure ineliminably in scientific understanding and whose falsehood is no epistemic defect. Veritism, she argues, cannot account for these facts. This paper argues that while Elgin rightly draws attention to several features of epistemic practices frequently neglected by veritists, veritists have numerous plausible ways of responding to her arguments. In particular, it is not clear that (...)
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  • Sharpening the tools of imagination.Michael T. Stuart - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-22.
    Thought experiments, models, diagrams, computer simulations, and metaphors can all be understood as tools of the imagination. While these devices are usually treated separately in philosophy of science, this paper provides a unified account according to which tools of the imagination are epistemically good insofar as they improve scientific imaginings. Improving scientific imagining is characterized in terms of epistemological consequences: more improvement means better consequences. A distinction is then drawn between tools being good in retrospect, at the time, and in (...)
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  • Understanding metaphorical understanding (literally).Michael T. Stuart & Daniel Wilkenfeld - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (3):1-20.
    Metaphors are found all throughout science: in published papers, working hypotheses, policy documents, lecture slides, grant proposals, and press releases. They serve different functions, but perhaps most striking is the way they enable understanding, of a theory, phenomenon, or idea. In this paper, we leverage recent advances on the nature of metaphor and the nature of understanding to explore how they accomplish this feat. We attempt to shift the focus away from the epistemic value of the content of metaphors, to (...)
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  • How Do We Obtain Understanding with the Help of Explanations?Gabriel Târziu - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (2):173-197.
    What exactly do we need in order to enjoy the cognitive benefit that is supposed to be provided by an explanation? Some philosophers :15–37, 2012, Episteme 10:1–17, 2013, Eur J Philos Sci 5:377–385, 2015, Understanding, explanation, and scientific knowledge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017) would say that all that we need is to know the explanation. Others :1–26, 2012; Strevens in Stud Hist Philos Sci Part A 44:510–515, 2013) would say that achieving understanding with the help of an explanation requires (...)
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  • From Explanation to Understanding: Normativity Lost?Henk W. de Regt - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (3):327-343.
    In recent years, scientific understanding has become a focus of attention in philosophy of science. Since understanding is typically associated with the pragmatic and psychological dimensions of explanation, shifting the focus from explanation to understanding may induce a shift from accounts that embody normative ideals to accounts that provide accurate descriptions of scientific practice. Not surprisingly, many ‘friends of understanding’ sympathize with a naturalistic approach to the philosophy of science. However, this raises the question of whether the proposed theories of (...)
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  • Descriptive understanding and prediction in COVID-19 modelling.Johannes Findl & Javier Suárez - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (4):1-31.
    COVID-19 has substantially affected our lives during 2020. Since its beginning, several epidemiological models have been developed to investigate the specific dynamics of the disease. Early COVID-19 epidemiological models were purely statistical, based on a curve-fitting approach, and did not include causal knowledge about the disease. Yet, these models had predictive capacity; thus they were used to ground important political decisions, in virtue of the understanding of the dynamics of the pandemic that they offered. This raises a philosophical question about (...)
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  • Understanding for Hire.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld & Christa M. Johnson - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (3):389-405.
    In this paper, we will explore one way in which understanding can—and, we will argue, should—be valuable. We will do this by drawing on what has been said about the different ways knowledge can be valuable. Our main contribution will be to identify one heretofore undiscussed way knowledge could be valuable, but isn’t—specifically, having value to someone other than the understander. We suggest that it is a desideratum on an account of understanding that understanding have the specified type of value; (...)
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  • Epistemic Value of Digital Simulacra for Patients.Eleanor Gilmore-Szott - 2023 - American Journal of Bioethics 23 (9):63-66.
    Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) models introduce unique considerations when determining their epistemic value. Fortunately, existing work on the epistemic features of AI/ML can...
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  • Understanding does not depend on (causal) explanation.Philippe Verreault-Julien - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (2):18.
    One can find in the literature two sets of views concerning the relationship between understanding and explanation: that one understands only if 1) one has knowledge of causes and 2) that knowledge is provided by an explanation. Taken together, these tenets characterize what I call the narrow knowledge account of understanding. While the first tenet has recently come under severe attack, the second has been more resistant to change. I argue that we have good reasons to reject it on the (...)
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  • Pluralism and Perspectivism in the American Pragmatist Tradition.Matthew Brown - 2019 - In Michela Massimi (ed.), Knowledge From a Human Point of View. Springer Verlag.
    This chapter explores perspectivism in the American Pragmatist tradition. On the one hand, the thematization of perspectivism in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science can benefit from resources in the American Pragmatist philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the Pragmatists have interesting and innovative, pluralistic views that can be illuminated through the lens of perspectivism. I pursue this inquiry primarily through examining relevant sources from the Pragmatist tradition. I will illustrate productive engagements between pragmatism and perspectivism in three areas: in (...)
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