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  1. (1 other version)Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World.Wesley C. Salmon - 1984 - Princeton University Press.
    The philosophical theory of scientific explanation proposed here involves a radically new treatment of causality that accords with the pervasively statistical character of contemporary science. Wesley C. Salmon describes three fundamental conceptions of scientific explanation--the epistemic, modal, and ontic. He argues that the prevailing view is untenable and that the modal conception is scientifically out-dated. Significantly revising aspects of his earlier work, he defends a causal/mechanical theory that is a version of the ontic conception. Professor Salmon's theory furnishes a robust (...)
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  • Progress and its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth.Larry Laudan - 1977 - University of California Press.
    (This insularity was further promoted by the guileless duplicity of scholars in other fields, who were all too prepared to bequeath "the problem of ...
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  • The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding.Jonathan L. Kvanvig - 2003 - Cambridge University Press.
    Epistemology has for a long time focused on the concept of knowledge and tried to answer questions such as whether knowledge is possible and how much of it there is. Often missing from this inquiry, however, is a discussion on the value of knowledge. In The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding Jonathan Kvanvig argues that epistemology properly conceived cannot ignore the question of the value of knowledge. He also questions one of the most fundamental assumptions in epistemology, (...)
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  • The Scientific Image.William Demopoulos & Bas C. van Fraassen - 1982 - Philosophical Review 91 (4):603.
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  • Science and Values: The Aims of Science and Their Role in Scientific Debate.Larry Laudan - 1984 - University of California Press.
    Laudan constructs a fresh approach to a longtime problem for the philosopher of science: how to explain the simultaneous and widespread presence of both agreement and disagreement in science. Laudan critiques the logical empiricists and the post-positivists as he stresses the need for centrality and values and the interdependence of values, methods, and facts as prerequisites to solving the problems of consensus and dissent in science.
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  • (1 other version)Causality and explanation.Wesley C. Salmon - 1998 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Wesley Salmon is renowned for his seminal contributions to the philosophy of science. He has powerfully and permanently shaped discussion of such issues as lawlike and probabilistic explanation and the interrelation of explanatory notions to causal notions. This unique volume brings together twenty-six of his essays on subjects related to causality and explanation, written over the period 1971-1995. Six of the essays have never been published before and many others have only appeared in obscure venues. The volume includes a section (...)
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  • (1 other version)Studies in the logic of explanation.Carl Gustav Hempel & Paul Oppenheim - 1948 - Philosophy of Science 15 (2):135-175.
    To explain the phenomena in the world of our experience, to answer the question “why?” rather than only the question “what?”, is one of the foremost objectives of all rational inquiry; and especially, scientific research in its various branches strives to go beyond a mere description of its subject matter by providing an explanation of the phenomena it investigates. While there is rather general agreement about this chief objective of science, there exists considerable difference of opinion as to the function (...)
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  • An Essay on Belief and Acceptance.Laurence Jonathan Cohen - 1992 - New York: Clarendon Press.
    In this incisive new book one of Britain's most eminent philosophers explores the often overlooked tension between voluntariness and involuntariness in human cognition. He seeks to counter the widespread tendency for analytic epistemology to be dominated by the concept of belief. Is scientific knowledge properly conceived as being embodied, at its best, in a passive feeling of belief or in an active policy of acceptance? Should a jury's verdict declare what its members involuntarily believe or what they voluntarily accept? And (...)
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  • Explanation and scientific understanding.Michael Friedman - 1974 - Journal of Philosophy 71 (1):5-19.
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  • Explanatory unification.Philip Kitcher - 1981 - Philosophy of Science 48 (4):507-531.
    The official model of explanation proposed by the logical empiricists, the covering law model, is subject to familiar objections. The goal of the present paper is to explore an unofficial view of explanation which logical empiricists have sometimes suggested, the view of explanation as unification. I try to show that this view can be developed so as to provide insight into major episodes in the history of science, and that it can overcome some of the most serious difficulties besetting the (...)
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  • Understanding Why.Alison Hills - 2015 - Noûs 49 (2):661-688.
    I argue that understanding why p involves a kind of intellectual know how and differsfrom both knowledge that p and knowledge why p (as they are standardly understood).I argue that understanding, in this sense, is valuable.
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  • Explanatory unification and the causal structure of the world.Philip Kitcher - 1962 - In Philip Kitcher & Wesley C. Salmon (eds.), Scientific Explanation. Univ of Minnesota Pr. pp. 410-505.
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  • (1 other version)Four Decades of Scientific Explanation.Wesley C. Salmon & Anne Fagot-Largeault - 1989 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 16 (2):355.
    As Aristotle stated, scientific explanation is based on deductive argument--yet, Wesley C. Salmon points out, not all deductive arguments are qualified explanations. The validity of the explanation must itself be examined. _Four Decades of Scientific Explanation_ provides a comprehensive account of the developments in scientific explanation that transpired in the last four decades of the twentieth century. It continues to stand as the most comprehensive treatment of the writings on the subject during these years. Building on the historic 1948 essay (...)
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  • Three Kinds of Idealization.Michael Weisberg - 2007 - Journal of Philosophy 104 (12):639-659.
    Philosophers of science increasingly recognize the importance of idealization: the intentional introduction of distortion into scientific theories. Yet this recognition has not yielded consensus about the nature of idealization. e literature of the past thirty years contains disparate characterizations and justifications, but little evidence of convergence towards a common position.
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  • No understanding without explanation.Michael Strevens - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (3):510-515.
    Scientific understanding, this paper argues, can be analyzed entirely in terms of a mental act of “grasping” and a notion of explanation. To understand why a phenomenon occurs is to grasp a correct explanation of the phenomenon. To understand a scientific theory is to be able to construct, or at least to grasp, a range of potential explanations in which that theory accounts for other phenomena. There is no route to scientific understanding, then, that does not go by way of (...)
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  • Is understanding a species of knowledge?Stephen R. Grimm - 2006 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (3):515-535.
    Among philosophers of science there seems to be a general consensus that understanding represents a species of knowledge, but virtually every major epistemologist who has thought seriously about understanding has come to deny this claim. Against this prevailing tide in epistemology, I argue that understanding is, in fact, a species of knowledge: just like knowledge, for example, understanding is not transparent and can be Gettiered. I then consider how the psychological act of "grasping" that seems to be characteristic of understanding (...)
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  • The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding.Michael Huemer - 2004 - Mind 113 (452):763-766.
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  • Understanding without Justification or Belief.Finnur Dellsén - 2017 - Ratio 30 (3):239-254.
    In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest among epistemologists in the nature of understanding, with some authors arguing that understanding should replace knowledge as the primary focus of epistemology. But what is understanding? According to what is often called the standard view, understanding is a species of knowledge. Although this view has recently been challenged in various ways, even the critics of the standard view have assumed that understanding requires justification and belief. I argue that it requires (...)
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  • Understanding and the facts.Catherine Elgin - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 132 (1):33 - 42.
    If understanding is factive, the propositions that express an understanding are true. I argue that a factive conception of understanding is unduly restrictive. It neither reflects our practices in ascribing understanding nor does justice to contemporary science. For science uses idealizations and models that do not mirror the facts. Strictly speaking, they are false. By appeal to exemplification, I devise a more generous, flexible conception of understanding that accommodates science, reflects our practices, and shows a sufficient but not slavish sensitivity (...)
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  • Understanding.Stephen Grimm - 2011 - In D. Pritchard S. Berneker (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Routledge.
    This entry offers a critical overview of the contemporary literature on understanding, especially in epistemology and the philosophy of science.
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  • Knowledge, Understanding and Epistemic Value.Duncan Pritchard - 2009 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 64:19-43.
    It is argued that a popular way of accounting for the distinctive value of knowledge by appeal to the distinctive value of cognitive achievements fails because it is a mistake to identify knowledge with cognitive achievements. Nevertheless, it is claimed that understanding, properly conceived, is a type of cognitive achievement, and thus that the distinctive value of cognitive achievements can explain why understanding is of special value.
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  • (2 other versions)Novum organum- (interpretación de la naturaleza y predominio del hombre).Francis Bacon & Joseph Devey (eds.) - 1933 - Madrid: [Imp. de L. Rubio].
    The Novum Organum, (or Novum Organum Scientiarum - "New Instrument of Science"), is a philosophical work by Francis Bacon, originally published in 1620. The title is a reference to Aristotle's work Organon, which was his treatise on logic and syllogism. In Novum Organum, Bacon details a new system of logic he believes to be superior to the old ways of syllogism. This is now known as the Baconian method.
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  • Recovering Understanding.Linda Zagzebski - 2001 - In Matthias Steup (ed.), Knowledge, truth, and duty: essays on epistemic justification, responsibility, and virtue. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • Understanding phenomena.Christoph Kelp - unknown
    The literature on the nature of understanding can be divided into two broad camps. Explanationists believe that it is knowledge of explanations that is key to understanding. In contrast, their manipulationist rivals maintain that understanding essentially involves an ability to manipulate certain representations. The aim of this paper is to provide a novel knowledge based account of understanding. More specifically, it proposes an account of maximal understanding of a given phenomenon in terms of fully comprehensive and maximally well-connected knowledge of (...)
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  • What is scientific progress?Alexander Bird - 2007 - Noûs 41 (1):64–89.
    I argue that scientific progress is precisely the accumulation of scientific knowledge.
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  • Understanding as representation manipulability.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):997-1016.
    Claims pertaining to understanding are made in a variety of contexts and ways. As a result, few in the philosophical literature have made an attempt to precisely characterize the state that is y understanding x. This paper builds an account that does just that. The account is motivated by two main observations. First, understanding x is somehow related to being able to manipulate x. Second, understanding is a mental phenomenon, and so what manipulations are required to be an understander must (...)
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  • Understanding without explanation.Peter Lipton - 2008 - In Henk W. De Regt, Sabina Leonelli & Kai Eigner (eds.), Scientific Understanding: Philosophical Perspectives. University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 43-63.
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  • Idealizations and scientific understanding.Moti Mizrahi - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (2):237-252.
    In this paper, I propose that the debate in epistemology concerning the nature and value of understanding can shed light on the role of scientific idealizations in producing scientific understanding. In philosophy of science, the received view seems to be that understanding is a species of knowledge. On this view, understanding is factive just as knowledge is, i.e., if S knows that p, then p is true. Epistemologists, however, distinguish between different kinds of understanding. Among epistemologists, there are those who (...)
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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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  • Science and Values.Harold I. Brown & Larry Laudan - 1986 - Philosophical Review 95 (3):439.
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  • ``Is Understanding Factive?".Catherine Z. Elgin - 2009 - In ``Is Understanding Factive?". Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 322--30.
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  • The Value of Understanding.Stephen Grimm - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (2):103-117.
    Over the last several years a number of leading philosophers – including Catherine Elgin, Linda Zagzebski, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Duncan Pritchard – have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the contemporary focus on knowledge in epistemology and have attempted to “recover” the notion of understanding. According to some of these philosophers, in fact, understanding deserves not just to be recovered, but to supplant knowledge as the focus of epistemological inquiry. This entry considers some of the main reasons why philosophers have taken understanding (...)
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  • Is Science Progressive?I. Niiniluoto - 1984 - Reidel.
    This collection brings together several essays which have been written between the years 197 5 and 1983. During that period I have been occupied with the attempt to find a satisfactory explicate for the notion of tnithlike ness or verisimilitude. The technical results of this search have partly appeared elsewhere, and I am also working on a systematic presentation of them in a companion volume to this book: Truthlikeness. The essays collected in this book are less formal and more philos (...)
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  • The myth of knowledge.Laurence BonJour - 2010 - Philosophical Perspectives 24 (1):57-83.
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  • (1 other version)4 decades of scientific explanation.Wesley C. Salmon - 1989 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 13:3-219.
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  • (1 other version)The Value of Understanding.Jonathan L. Kvanvig - 2009 - In Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic value. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 95-112.
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  • Novum Organum.Francis Bacon, Peter Urbach & John Gibson - 1996 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (1):125-128.
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  • The Role of Explanation in Understanding.Kareem Khalifa - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (1):161-187.
    Peter Lipton has argued that understanding can exist in the absence of explanation. We argue that this does not denigrate explanation's importance to understanding. Specifically, we show that all of Lipton's examples are consistent with the idea that explanation is the ideal of understanding, i.e. other modes of understanding ought to be assessed by how well they replicate the understanding provided by a good and correct explanation. We defend this idea by showing that for all of Lipton's examples of non-explanatory (...)
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  • Scientific progress as increasing verisimilitude.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 46:73-77.
    According to the foundationalist picture, shared by many rationalists and positivist empiricists, science makes cognitive progress by accumulating justified truths. Fallibilists, who point out that complete certainty cannot be achieved in empirical science, can still argue that even successions of false theories may progress toward the truth. This proposal was supported by Karl Popper with his notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Popper’s own technical definition failed, but the idea that scientific progress means increasing truthlikeness can be expressed by defining degrees (...)
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  • Understanding, grasping and luck.Kareem Khalifa - 2013 - Episteme 10 (1):1-17.
    Recently, it has been debated as to whether understanding is a species of explanatory knowledge. Those who deny this claim frequently argue that understanding, unlike knowledge, can be lucky. In this paper I argue that current arguments do not support this alleged compatibility between understanding and epistemic luck. First, I argue that understanding requires reliable explanatory evaluation, yet the putative examples of lucky understanding underspecify the extent to which subjects possess this ability. In the course of defending this claim, I (...)
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  • Is understanding explanatory or objectual?Kareem Khalifa - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):1153-1171.
    Jonathan Kvanvig has argued that “objectual” understanding, i.e. the understanding we have of a large body of information, cannot be reduced to explanatory concepts. In this paper, I show that Kvanvig fails to establish this point, and then propose a framework for reducing objectual understanding to explanatory understanding.
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  • Scientific progress without increasing verisimilitude: In response to Niiniluoto.Darrell Patrick Rowbottom - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 51:100-104.
    First, I argue that scientific progress is possible in the absence of increasing verisimilitude in science’s theories. Second, I argue that increasing theoretical verisimilitude is not the central, or primary, dimension of scientific progress. Third, I defend my previous argument that unjustified changes in scientific belief may be progressive. Fourth, I illustrate how false beliefs can promote scientific progress in ways that cannot be explicated by appeal to verisimilitude.
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  • Progress as Approximation to the Truth: A Defence of the Verisimilitudinarian Approach.Gustavo Cevolani & Luca Tambolo - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (4):921-935.
    In this paper we provide a compact presentation of the verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress (VS, for short) and defend it against the sustained attack recently mounted by Alexander Bird (2007). Advocated by such authors as Ilkka Niiniluoto and Theo Kuipers, VS is the view that progress can be explained in terms of the increasing verisimilitude (or, equivalently, truthlikeness, or approximation to the truth) of scientific theories. According to Bird, VS overlooks the central issue of the appropriate grounding of scientific (...)
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  • ``Understanding, Knowledge, and the M eno Requirement".Wayne D. Riggs - 2009 - In Epistemic Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  • Outline of a theory of scientific understanding.Gerhard Schurz & Karel Lambert - 1994 - Synthese 101 (1):65-120.
    The basic theory of scientific understanding presented in Sections 1–2 exploits three main ideas.First, that to understand a phenomenonP (for a given agent) is to be able to fitP into the cognitive background corpusC (of the agent).Second, that to fitP intoC is to connectP with parts ofC (via arguments in a very broad sense) such that the unification ofC increases.Third, that the cognitive changes involved in unification can be treated as sequences of shifts of phenomena inC. How the theory fits (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Scientific Progress.I. Niiniluoto - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Reintroducing prediction to explanation.Heather E. Douglas - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (4):444-463.
    Although prediction has been largely absent from discussions of explanation for the past 40 years, theories of explanation can gain much from a reintroduction. I review the history that divorced prediction from explanation, examine the proliferation of models of explanation that followed, and argue that accounts of explanation have been impoverished by the neglect of prediction. Instead of a revival of the symmetry thesis, I suggest that explanation should be understood as a cognitive tool that assists us in generating new (...)
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  • From knowledge to understanding.Catherine Z. Elgin - 2006 - In Stephen Cade Hetherington (ed.), Epistemology futures. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 199--215.
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  • It's not what you know that counts.Mark Kaplan - 1985 - Journal of Philosophy 82 (7):350-363.
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  • Understanding, explanation, and unification.Victor Gijsbers - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (3):516-522.
    In this article I argue that there are two different types of understanding: the understanding we get from explanations, and the understanding we get from unification. This claim is defended by first showing that explanation and unification are not as closely related as has sometimes been thought. A critical appraisal of recent proposals for understanding without explanation leads us to discuss the example of a purely classificatory biology: it turns out that such a science can give us understanding of the (...)
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