Results for 'Understanding'

971 found
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  1. Understanding from Machine Learning Models.Emily Sullivan - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (1):109-133.
    Simple idealized models seem to provide more understanding than opaque, complex, and hyper-realistic models. However, an increasing number of scientists are going in the opposite direction by utilizing opaque machine learning models to make predictions and draw inferences, suggesting that scientists are opting for models that have less potential for understanding. Are scientists trading understanding for some other epistemic or pragmatic good when they choose a machine learning model? Or are the assumptions behind why minimal models provide (...)
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  2. Understanding as Usability and Context-Sensitivity to Interests.Andreas Søndergaard - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (5):2603-2623.
    Is understanding subject to a factivity constraint? That is, must the agent’s representation of some subject matter be accurate in order for her to understand that subject matter? ‘No’, I argue in this paper. As an alternative, I formulate a novel manipulationist account of understanding. Rather than correctly representing, understanding, on this account, is a matter of being able to manipulate a representation of the world to satisfy contextually salient interests. This account of understanding is preferable (...)
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  3. Moral understanding and knowledge.Amber Riaz - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (1):113-128.
    Moral understanding is a species of knowledge. Understanding why an action is wrong, for example, amounts to knowing why the action is wrong. The claim that moral understanding is immune to luck while moral knowledge is not does not withstand scrutiny; nor does the idea that there is something deep about understanding for there are different degrees of understanding. It is also mistaken to suppose that grasping is a distinct psychological state that accompanies understanding. (...)
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  4. Communicating Understanding.Adham El Shazly - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Knowledge can be transmitted through testimony. What about understanding? In this paper I argue against the possibility of testimonial understanding by giving an account of understanding in terms of ‘mental structures’. Then I argue while we cannot integrate communicating understanding into a propositional model of epistemic communication, we can do so on a perspectival model. I highlight the importance of this to the epistemology of education throughout.
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  5. 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. (...)
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  6. 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 (...)
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  7. 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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  8. "Understanding and Transparency".Stephen R. Grimm - 2017 - In Stephen Grimm Christoph Baumberger & Sabine Ammon (eds.), Explaining Understanding: New Perspectives from Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Routledge.
    I explore the extent to which the epistemic state of understanding is transparent to the one who understands. Against several contemporary epistemologists, I argue that it is not transparent in the way that many have claimed, drawing on results from developmental psychology, animal cognition, and other fields.
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  9. 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 (...)
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  10. Is Understanding Epistemic in Nature?Gurpreet Rattan & Åsa Wikforss - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (2).
    Is understanding epistemic in nature? Does a correct account of what constitutes understanding of a concept mention epistemological notions such as knowledge, justification or epistemic rationality? We defend the view that understanding is epistemic in nature – we defend epistemological conceptions of understanding. We focus our discussion with a critical evaluation of Tim Williamson's challenges to epistemological conceptions of understanding in The Philosophy of Philosophy. Against Williamson, we distinguish three kinds of epistemological conceptions and argue (...)
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  11. 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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  12. Moral Understanding, Testimony, and Moral Exemplarity.Michel Croce - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (2):373-389.
    While possessing moral understanding is agreed to be a core epistemic and moral value, it remains a matter of dispute whether it can be acquired via testimony and whether it involves an ability to engage in moral reasoning. This paper addresses both issues with the aim of contributing to the current debates on moral understanding in moral epistemology and virtue ethics. It is argued that moral epistemologists should stop appealing to the argument from the transmissibility of moral (...) to make a case for their favorite view of moral understanding. It is also argued that proponents of exemplarist moral theories cannot remain neutral on whether the ability to engage in moral reasoning is a necessary component of moral understanding. (shrink)
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  13. Testifying understanding.Kenneth Boyd - 2017 - Episteme 14 (1):103-127.
    While it is widely acknowledged that knowledge can be acquired via testimony, it has been argued that understanding cannot. While there is no consensus about what the epistemic relationship of understanding consists in, I argue here that regardless of how understanding is conceived there are kinds of understanding that can be acquired through testimony: easy understanding and easy-s understanding. I address a number of aspects of understanding that might stand in the way of (...)
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  14. Understanding, Truth, and Epistemic Goals.Kareem Khalifa - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):944-956.
    Several argue that truth cannot be science’s sole epistemic goal, for it would fail to do justice to several scientific practices that advance understanding. I challenge these arguments, but only after making a small concession: science’s sole epistemic goal is not truth as such; rather, its goal is finding true answers to relevant questions. Using examples from the natural and social sciences, I then show that scientific understanding’s epistemically valuable features are either true answers to relevant questions or (...)
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  15. Understanding Biology in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.Adham El Shazly, Elsa Lawerence, Srijit Seal, Chaitanya Joshi, Matthew Greening, Pietro Lio, Shantung Singh, Andreas Bender & Pietro Sormanni - manuscript
    Modern life sciences research is increasingly relying on artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to model biological systems, primarily centered around the use of machine learning (ML) models. Although ML is undeniably useful for identifying patterns in large, complex data sets, its widespread application in biological sciences represents a significant deviation from traditional methods of scientific inquiry. As such, the interplay between these models and scientific understanding in biology is a topic with important implications for the future of scientific research, yet (...)
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  16. Understanding Physics: ‘What?’, ‘Why?’, and ‘How?’.Mario Hubert - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-36.
    I want to combine two hitherto largely independent research projects, scientific understanding and mechanistic explanations. Understanding is not only achieved by answering why-questions, that is, by providing scientific explanations, but also by answering what-questions, that is, by providing what I call scientific descriptions. Based on this distinction, I develop three forms of understanding: understanding-what, understanding-why, and understanding-how. I argue that understanding-how is a particularly deep form of understanding, because it is based on (...)
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  17. 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 (...) of X. This account is briefly compared to two rival accounts of scientific progress, based respectively on increasing truthlikeness and accumulating knowledge, and is argued to be preferable to both. (shrink)
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  18. On Understanding and Testimony.Federica Isabella Malfatti - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (6):1345-1365.
    Testimony spreads information. It is also commonly agreed that it can transfer knowledge. Whether it can work as an epistemic source of understanding is a matter of dispute. However, testimony certainly plays a pivotal role in the proliferation of understanding in the epistemic community. But how exactly do we learn, and how do we make advancements in understanding on the basis of one another’s words? And what can we do to maximize the probability that the process of (...)
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  19. Understanding with Toy Surrogate Models in Machine Learning.Andrés Páez - 2024 - Minds and Machines 34 (4):45.
    In the natural and social sciences, it is common to use toy models—extremely simple and highly idealized representations—to understand complex phenomena. Some of the simple surrogate models used to understand opaque machine learning (ML) models, such as rule lists and sparse decision trees, bear some resemblance to scientific toy models. They allow non-experts to understand how an opaque ML model works globally via a much simpler model that highlights the most relevant features of the input space and their effect on (...)
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  20. 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. (...)
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  21. Understanding and the Norm of Explanation.John Turri - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (4):1171-1175.
    I propose and defend the hypothesis that understanding is the norm of explanation. On this proposal, an explanation should express understanding. I call this the understanding account of explanation. The understanding account is supported by social and introspective observations. It is also supported by the relationship between knowledge and understanding, on the one hand, and assertion and explanation, on the other.
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  22. Better Understanding Through Falsehood.Benjamin T. Rancourt - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (3):382-405.
    Can understanding be based on false beliefs? I argue that it can. I first argue that the best way to understand the question is that it is whether one can increase one's degree of understanding by adopting an overall less accurate body of beliefs. I identify three sufficient conditions for one body of beliefs to be more accurate than another. Next, I appeal to two widely used methods of comparing degrees of understanding. With these methods, I show (...)
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  23. Transmitting Understanding and Know-How.Stephen Grimm - 2019 - In Stephen Cade Hetherington & Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology. New York: Routledge.
    Among contemporary epistemologists and scholars of ancient philosophy, one often hears that transmitting propositional knowledge by testimony is usually easy and straightforward, but transmitting understanding and know-how by testimony is usually difficult or simply impossible. Further provocative conclusions are then sometimes drawn from these claims: for instance, that know-how and understanding are not types of propositional knowledge. In contrast, I argue that transmitting propositional knowledge is sometimes easy and sometimes hard, just as transmitting know how and understanding (...)
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  24. Must Understanding Be Coherent?Kareem Khalifa - 2017 - In Stephen Grimm Christoph Baumberger & Sabine Ammon (eds.), Explaining Understanding: New Perspectives from Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Routledge. pp. 139-164.
    Several authors suggest that understanding and epistemic coherence are tightly connected. Using an account of understanding that makes no appeal to coherence, I explain away the intuitions that motivate this position. I then show that the leading coherentist epistemologies only place plausible constraints on understanding insofar as they replicate my own account’s requirements. I conclude that understanding is only superficially coherent.
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  25. 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 (...)
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  26. 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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  27. Understanding friendship.Michel Croce & Matthew Jope - 2024 - Philosophical Issues 34 (1):371-386.
    This article takes issue with two prominent views in the current debate around epistemic partiality in friendship. Strong views of epistemic partiality hold that friendship may require biased beliefs in direct conflict with epistemic norms. Weak views hold that friendship may place normative expectations on belief formation but in a manner that does not violate these norms. It is argued that neither view succeeds in explaining the relationship between epistemic norms and friendship norms. Weak views inadvertently endorse a form of (...)
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  28. Moral Understanding Between You and Me.Samuel Dishaw - 2024 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 52 (3):327-357.
    Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 327-357, Summer 2024.
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  29. 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 (...)
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  30. Art, Understanding, and Mystery.Robbie Kubala - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    Apparent orthodoxy holds that artistic understanding is finally valuable. Artistic understanding—grasping, as such, the features of an artwork that make it aesthetically or artistically good or bad—is a species of understanding, which is widely taken to be finally valuable. The objection from mystery, by contrast, holds that a lack of artistic understanding is valuable. I distinguish and critically assess two versions of this objection. The first holds that a lack of artistic understanding is finally valuable, (...)
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  31. 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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  32. 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 (...)
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  33. Understanding and Structure.Allan Hazlett - 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.
    In the Phaedrus, Socreates sympathetically describes the ability “to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do.” (265e) In contemporary philosophy, Ted Sider (2009, 2011) defends the same idea. As I shall put it, Plato and Sider’s idea is that limning structure is an epistemic goal. My aim in this paper is to articulate and defend this idea. First, I’ll articulate the notion (...)
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  34. Understanding Moral Responsibility in Automated Decision-Making: Responsibility Gaps and Strategies to Address Them.Andrea Berber & Jelena Mijić - 2024 - Theoria: Beograd 67 (3):177-192.
    This paper delves into the use of machine learning-based systems in decision-making processes and its implications for moral responsibility as traditionally defined. It focuses on the emergence of responsibility gaps and examines proposed strategies to address them. The paper aims to provide an introductory and comprehensive overview of the ongoing debate surrounding moral responsibility in automated decision-making. By thoroughly examining these issues, we seek to contribute to a deeper understanding of the implications of AI integration in society.
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  35. Understanding without Justification and Belief?Seungbae Park - 2017 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 21 (3):379–389.
    Dellsén (2016a) argues that understanding requires neither justification nor belief. I object that ridding understanding of justification and belief comes with the following costs. (i) No claim about the world can be inferred from what we understand. (ii) We run into either Moore’s paradox or certain disconcerting questions. (iii) Understanding does not represent the world. (iv) Understanding cannot take the central place in epistemology. (v) Understanding cannot be invoked to give an account of scientific progress. (...)
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  36. Understanding, interests and informed consent: a reply to Sreenivasan.Danielle Bromwich - 2015 - Journal of Medical Ethics 41 (4):327-331.
    It is widely agreed that the view of informed consent found in the regulations and guidelines struggles to keep pace with the ever-advancing enterprise of human subjects research. Over the last 10 years, there have been serious attempts to rethink informed consent so that it conforms to our considered judgments about cases where we are confident valid consent has been given. These arguments are influenced by an argument from Gopal Sreenivasan, which apparently shows that a potential participant9s consent to research (...)
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  37. Are There Understanding-Assent Links?Åsa Wikforss - 2009 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 5.
    It is commonly held that there are internal links between understanding and assent such that being semantically competent with an expression requires accepting certain sentences as true. The paper discusses a recent challenge to this conception of semantic competence, posed by Timothy Williamson (2007). According to Williamson there are no understanding-assent links of the suggested sort, no internal connection between semantic competence and belief. I suggest that Williamson is quite right to question the claim that being semantically competent (...)
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  38. Understanding the Progress of Science.C. D. McCoy - 2022 - In Insa Lawler, Kareem Khalifa & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 353-369.
    Philosophical debates on how to account for the progress of science have traditionally divided along the realism-anti-realism axis. Relatively recent developments in epistemology, however, have opened up a new knowledge-understanding axis to the debate. This chapter presents a novel understanding-based account of scientific progress that takes its motivation from problem-solving practices in science. Problem-solving is characterized as a means of measuring degree of understanding, which is argued to be the principal epistemic (or cognitive) aim of science, over (...)
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  39. Testimony, Understanding, and Art Criticism.Allan Hazlett - forthcoming - In Alex King (ed.), Philosophy and Art: New Essays at the Intersection. Oxford University Press.
    I present a puzzle – the “puzzle of aesthetic testimony” – along with a solution to it that appeals to the impossibility of testimonial understanding. I'll criticize this solution by defending the possibility of testimonial understanding, including testimonial aesthetic understanding.
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  40. Collective Understanding — A conceptual defense for when groups should be regarded as epistemic agents with understanding.Sven Delarivière - forthcoming - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies (2).
    Could groups ever be an understanding subject (an epistemic agent ascribed with understanding) or should we keep our focus exclusively on the individuals that make up the group? The way this paper will shape an answer to this question is by starting from a case we are most willing to accept as group understanding, then mark out the crucial differences with an unconvincing case, and, ultimately, explain why these differences matter. In order to concoct the cases, however, (...)
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  41. Understanding Race: The Case for Political Constructionism in Public Discourse.David Ludwig - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (4):492-504.
    The aim of this article is to develop an understanding-based argument for an explicitly political specification of the concept of race. It is argued that a specification of race in terms of hierarchical social positions is best equipped to guide causal reasoning about racial inequality in the public sphere. Furthermore, the article provides evidence that biological and cultural specifications of race mislead public reasoning by encouraging confusions between correlates and causes of racial inequality. The article concludes with a more (...)
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  42.  6
    Understanding Flusser Understanding Modernism.Jaffe Aaron (ed.) - 2022 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    The Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) has been recognized as a decisive past master in the emergence of contemporary media theory and media archeology. His work engages and also rethinks several mythologies of modernity, devising new methodologies, experimental literary practices, and expanded hermeneutics that trouble traditional practices of literary/literate knowledge, shared experience, reception, and communication. -/- Working within an expanded concept of modernism, Flusser presciently noted the power inherent in algorithmic information apparatuses to reshape our fundamental conceptions of culture and (...)
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  43. Understanding and scientific progress: lessons from epistemology.Nicholas Emmerson - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-18.
    Contemporary debate surrounding the nature of scientific progress has focused upon the precise role played by justification, with two realist accounts having dominated proceedings. Recently, however, a third realist account has been put forward, one which offers no role for justification at all. According to Finnur Dellsén’s (Stud Hist Philos Sci Part A 56:72–83, 2016) noetic account, science progresses when understanding increases, that is, when scientists grasp how to correctly explain or predict more aspects of the world that they (...)
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  44. (1 other version)Understanding in Medicine.Somogy Varga - 2023 - Erkenntnis 134 (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 medicine. The main hypothesis is that grasping a mechanistic explanation of a condition is necessary (...)
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  45. Understanding Implicit Bias: Putting the Criticism into Perspective.Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva & Bertram Gawronski - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (2):276-307.
    What is the status of research on implicit bias? In light of meta‐analyses revealing ostensibly low average correlations between implicit measures and behavior, as well as various other psychometric concerns, criticism has become ubiquitous. We argue that while there are significant challenges and ample room for improvement, research on the causes, psychological properties, and behavioral effects of implicit bias continues to deserve a role in the sciences of the mind as well as in efforts to understand, and ultimately combat, discrimination (...)
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  46. 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 (...)
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  47. Understanding Scientific Progress: Aim-Oriented Empiricism.Nicholas Maxwell - 2017 - St. Paul, USA: Paragon House.
    "Understanding Scientific Progress constitutes a potentially enormous and revolutionary advancement in philosophy of science. It deserves to be read and studied by everyone with any interest in or connection with physics or the theory of science. Maxwell cites the work of Hume, Kant, J.S. Mill, Ludwig Bolzmann, Pierre Duhem, Einstein, Henri Poincaré, C.S. Peirce, Whitehead, Russell, Carnap, A.J. Ayer, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Nelson Goodman, Bas van Fraassen, and numerous others. He lauds Popper for advancing (...)
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  48. Etiology, understanding, and testimonial belief.Andrew Peet - 2018 - Synthese 195 (4):1547-1567.
    The etiology of a perceptual belief can seemingly affect its epistemic status. There are cases in which perceptual beliefs seem to be unjustified because the perceptual experiences on which they are based are caused, in part, by wishful thinking, or irrational prior beliefs. It has been argued that this is problematic for many internalist views in the epistemology of perception, especially those which postulate immediate perceptual justification. Such views are unable to account for the impact of an experience’s etiology on (...)
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  49. Understanding with epistemic possibilities: The epistemic aim and value of metaphysics.Ylwa Sjölin Wirling - 2024 - Argumenta 10 (1):89-106.
    According to a recent proposal, the epistemic aim of metaphysics as a discipline is to chart the different viable theories of metaphysical objects of inquiry (e.g. causation, persistence). This paper elaborates on and seeks to improve on that proposal in two related ways. First, drawing on an analogy with how-possibly explanation in science, I argue that we can usefully understand this aim of metaphysics as the charting of epistemically possible answers to metaphysical questions. Second, I argue that in order to (...)
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  50. Political Understanding.Maxime C. Lepoutre - 2022 - British Journal of Political Science 1 (1).
    Public opinion research has shown that voters accept many falsehoods about politics. This observation is widely considered troubling for democracy—and especially participatory ideals of democracy. I argue that this influential narrative is nevertheless flawed, because it misunderstands the nature of political understanding. Drawing on philosophical examinations of scientific modelling, I demonstrate that accepting falsehoods within one’s model of political reality is compatible with—and indeed can positively enhance—one’s understanding of that reality. Thus, the observation that voters accept many political (...)
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