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  1. The Object of Moral Understanding.Samuel Dishaw - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    In the recent literatures in which moral understanding has played a starring role, it is assumed that moral understanding is a species of explanatory understanding. That is, it is assumed that instances of moral understanding are of the form ‘S understands why p,’ where p is some explicitly moral proposition, paradigmatically about an action being morally right or wrong. This paper highlights some shortcomings of this explanatory picture of moral understanding and articulates a different, complementary account on which the object (...)
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  • Wisdom, Action, and Knowledge.Oushinar Nath - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry.
    An important debate in the current philosophy of wisdom is whether knowledge is necessary for wisdom. In this paper I argue that knowledge is necessary to explain wise actions. Towards this, firstly, I individuate two modal properties relevant for wise actions: (i) counterfactual robustness: an action performed in the actual world is wise only if it leads to or is constituted by the goals of living well in all nearby worlds; (ii) rational robustness: an action performed for the sake of (...)
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  • How Values Shape the Machine Learning Opacity Problem.Emily Sullivan - 2022 - In Insa Lawler, Kareem Khalifa & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 306-322.
    One of the main worries with machine learning model opacity is that we cannot know enough about how the model works to fully understand the decisions they make. But how much is model opacity really a problem? This chapter argues that the problem of machine learning model opacity is entangled with non-epistemic values. The chapter considers three different stages of the machine learning modeling process that corresponds to understanding phenomena: (i) model acceptance and linking the model to the phenomenon, (ii) (...)
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  • Sensitive to Reasons: Moral Intuition and the Dual Process Challenge to Ethics.Dario Cecchini - 2022 - Dissertation,
    This dissertation is a contribution to the field of empirically informed metaethics, which combines the rigorous conceptual clarity of traditional metaethics with a careful review of empirical evidence. More specifically, this work stands at the intersection of moral psychology, moral epistemology, and philosophy of action. The study comprises six chapters on three distinct (although related) topics. Each chapter is structured as an independent paper and addresses a specific open question in the literature. The first part concerns the psychological features and (...)
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  • Grounding, Understanding, and Explanation.Wes Siscoe - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (4):791-815.
    Starting with the slogan that understanding is a ‘knowledge of causes’, Stephen Grimm and John Greco have argued that understanding comes from a knowledge of dependence relations. Grounding is the trendiest dependence relation on the market, and if Grimm and Greco are correct, then instances of grounding should also give rise to understanding. In this paper, I will show that this prediction is correct – grounding does indeed generate understanding in just the way that Grimm and Greco anticipate. However, grounding (...)
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  • Debunking, Epistemic Achievement, and Undermining Defeat.Michael Klenk - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (1):43-60.
    Several anti-debunkers have argued that evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs fail to meet a necessary condition on undermining defeat called modal security. They conclude that evolution, therefore, does not debunk our moral beliefs. This article shows that modal security is false if knowledge is virtuous achievement. New information can undermine a given belief without providing reason to doubt that that belief is sensitive or safe. This leads to a novel conception of undermining defeat, and it shows that successful debunking (...)
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  • What's the Point of Understanding?Michael Hannon - 2019 - In What's the Point of Knowledge? A Function-First Epistemology. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    What is human understanding and why should we care about it? I propose a method of philosophical investigation called ‘function-first epistemology’ and use this method to investigate the nature and value of understanding-why. I argue that the concept of understanding-why serves the practical function of identifying good explainers, which is an important role in the general economy of our concepts. This hypothesis sheds light on a variety of issues in the epistemology of understanding including the role of explanation, the relationship (...)
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  • Recent Work in the Epistemology of Understanding.Michael Hannon - 2021 - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (3):269-290.
    The philosophical interest in the nature, value, and varieties of human understanding has swelled in recent years. This article will provide an overview of new research in the epistemology of understanding, with a particular focus on the following questions: What is understanding and why should we care about it? Is understanding reducible to knowledge? Does it require truth, belief, or justification? Can there be lucky understanding? Does it require ‘grasping’ or some kind of ‘know-how’? This cluster of questions has largely (...)
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  • (1 other version)Davidson’s Phenomenological Argument Against the Cognitive Claims of Metaphor.Richmond Kwesi - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (3):341-364.
    In this paper, I take a critical look at the Davidsonian argument that metaphorical sentences do not express propositions because of the phenomenological experience—seeing one thing as another thing—involved in understanding them as metaphors. According to Davidson, seeing-as is not seeing-that. This verdict is aimed at dislodging metaphor from the position of being assessed with the semantic notions of propositions, meaning, and truth. I will argue that the phenomenological or perceptual experience associated with metaphors does not determine the propositional contentfulness (...)
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  • Moral Understanding and Cooperative Testimony.Kenneth Boyd - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (1):18-33.
    It is has been argued that there is a problem with moral testimony: testimony is deferential, and basing judgments and actions on deferentially acquired knowledge prevents them from having moral worth. What morality perhaps requires of us, then, is that we understand why a proposition is true, but this is something that cannot be acquired through testimony. I argue here that testimony can be both deferential as well as cooperative, and that one can acquire moral understanding through cooperative testimony. The (...)
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  • Is Understanding Reducible?Lewis D. Ross - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (2):117-135.
    Despite playing an important role in epistemology, philosophy of science, and more recently in moral philosophy and aesthetics, the nature of understanding is still much contested. One attractive framework attempts to reduce understanding to other familiar epistemic states. This paper explores and develops a methodology for testing such reductionist theories before offering a counterexample to a recently defended variant on which understanding reduces to what an agent knows.
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  • Sentimentalism about Moral Understanding.Nathan Robert Howard - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (5):1065-1078.
    Some have attempted to explain why it appears that action based on deferential moral belief lacks moral worth by appealing to claims about an attitude that is difficult to acquire through testimony, which theorists have called “moral understanding”. I argue that this state is at least partly non-cognitive. I begin by employing case-driven judgments to undermine the assumption that I argue is responsible for the strangeness of deferential moral belief: the assumption that if an agent knows that some fact gives (...)
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  • Environmental luck and the structure of understanding.Kenneth Boyd - 2020 - Episteme 17 (1):73-87.
    ABSTRACTConventional wisdom holds that there is no lucky knowledge: if it is a matter of luck, in some relevant sense, that one's belief that p is true, then one does not know that p. Here I will argue that there is similarly no lucky understanding, at least in the case of one type of luck, namely environmental luck. This argument has three parts. First, we need to determine how we evaluate whether one has understanding, which requires determining what I will (...)
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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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  • (1 other version)How Thought Experiments Increase Understanding.Michael T. Stuart - 2017 - In Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments. London: Routledge. pp. 526-544.
    We might think that thought experiments are at their most powerful or most interesting when they produce new knowledge. This would be a mistake; thought experiments that seek understanding are just as powerful and interesting, and perhaps even more so. A growing number of epistemologists are emphasizing the importance of understanding for epistemology, arguing that it should supplant knowledge as the central notion. In this chapter, I bring the literature on understanding in epistemology to bear on explicating the different ways (...)
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  • Understanding: not know-how.Emily Sullivan - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (1):221-240.
    There is considerable agreement among epistemologists that certain abilities are constitutive of understanding-why. These abilities include: constructing explanations, drawing conclusions, and answering questions. This agreement has led epistemologists to conclude that understanding is a kind of know-how. However, in this paper, I argue that the abilities constitutive of understanding are the same kind of cognitive abilities that we find in ordinary cases of knowledge-that and not the kind of practical abilities associated with know-how. I argue for this by disambiguating between (...)
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  • IV—Understanding and Knowing.Paulina Sliwa - 2015 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (1pt1):57-74.
    What is the relationship between understanding and knowing? This paper offers a defence of reductionism about understanding: the view that instances of understanding reduce to instances of knowing. I argue that knowing is both necessary and sufficient for understanding. I then outline some advantages of reductionism.
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  • Moral Reasons for Moral Beliefs: A Puzzle for Moral Testimony Pessimism.Andrew Reisner & Joseph Van Weelden - 2015 - Logos and Episteme 6 (4):429-448.
    According to moral testimony pessimists, the testimony of moral experts does not provide non-experts with normative reasons for belief. Moral testimony optimists hold that it does. We first aim to show that moral testimony optimism is, to the extent such things may be shown, the more natural view about moral testimony. Speaking roughly, the supposed discontinuity between the norms of moral beliefs and the norms of non-moral beliefs, on careful reflection, lacks the intuitive advantage that it is sometimes supposed to (...)
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  • Grasp and scientific understanding: a recognition account.Michael Strevens - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (4):741-762.
    To understand why a phenomenon occurs, it is not enough to possess a correct explanation of the phenomenon: you must grasp the explanation. In this formulation, “grasp” is a placeholder, standing for the psychological or epistemic relation that connects a mind to the explanatory facts in such a way as to produce understanding. This paper proposes and defends an account of the “grasping” relation according to which grasp of a property (to take one example of the sort of entity that (...)
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  • How to Identify Moral Experts.Amber Riaz - 2020 - The Journal of Ethics 25 (1):123-136.
    Many philosophers think that we can identify, e.g., a weather expert by checking if she has a track record of making accurate weather predictions but that there isn’t an analogous way for laypeople to verify the judgement of a putative moral expert. The weather is an independent check for weather expertise but there is no independent check for moral expertise, and the only way for laypeople to identify moral experts is to engage in first-order moral reasoning of one’s own. But (...)
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  • The Explanation Proffering Norm of Moral Assertion.Mona Simion - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (3):477-488.
    In recent years, much attention has been given to the epistemic credentials of belief based on moral testimony. Some people think pure moral deference is wrong, others disagree. It comes as a surprise, however, that while the epistemic responsibilities of the receiver of moral testimony have been closely scrutinized, little to no discussion has focused on the epistemic duties of the speaker. This paper aims to supply this lack: it defends a function-first account of the normativity of moral assertion. According (...)
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  • (1 other version)Davidson’s Phenomenological Argument Against the Cognitive Claims of Metaphor.Richmond Kwesi - 2019 - Axiomathes 30:1-24.
    In this paper, I take a critical look at the Davidsonian argument that metaphorical sentences do not express propositions because of the phenomenological experience—seeing one thing as another thing—involved in understanding them as metaphors. According to Davidson, seeing-as is not seeing-that. This verdict is aimed at dislodging metaphor from the position of being assessed with the semantic notions of propositions, meaning, and truth. I will argue that the phenomenological or perceptual experience associated with metaphors does not determine the propositional contentfulness (...)
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