A useful taxonomising question is the following: how strong a link does understanding demand between the beliefs we have about a given subject matter and the propositions that are true of that subject matter? To the extent that this is right, Zagzebski is endorsing a kind of KU principle (compare: KK). (vi) an ability to give q (the right explanation) when given the information p. Kvanvig (2003; 2009) offers such a view, according to which understanding of some subject matter is incompatible with false central beliefs about the subject matter. 1pt1): pp. Examines reasons to suppose that attributions of understanding are typically attributions of knowledge, understanding-why or objectual understanding. But in this version of the case, suppose that, although the book is entirely authoritative, genuine and reliable, it is the only trustworthy book on the Comanche on the shelvesevery book on the shelves nearby, which she easily could have grabbed rather than the genuine authoritative book, was filled with rumors and ungrounded suppositions. In the study of epistemology, philosophers are concerned with the epistemological shift. Batterman, R. W. Idealization and modelling. Synthese, 169(3) (2009): 427-446. The following sections consider why understanding might have such additional value. Though her work on understanding is not limited to scientific understanding (for example, Elgin 2004), one notable argument she has made is framed to show that a factive conception cannot do justice to the cognitive contributions of science and that a more flexible conception can (2007: 32). A., Kallestrup, J. Palermos, S.O. Take first the object question. That said, Hills adds some qualifications. One helpful way to think about this is as follows: if one takes a paradigmatic case of an individual who understands a subject matter thoroughly, and manipulates the credence the agent has toward the propositions constituting the subject matter, how low can one go before the agent no longer understands the subject matter in question? A potential worry then is that the achievement one attains when one understands chemistry need not involve the subject working the subject matterin this case, chemistryscause. Discusses whether intellectualist arguments for reducing know-how to propositional knowledge might also apply to understanding-why (if it is a type of knowing how). al 2014), have for understanding? And, thirdly, two questions about what is involved in grasping can easily be run together, but should be kept separate. Your paper should be 3-4 pages in length, not counting the Title page and Reference page. Pritchards assessment then of whether understanding is compatible with epistemic luck that is incompatible with knowledge depends on which kind of epistemic luck incompatible with knowledge one is discussing. Secondly, even subject matters that traffic in empirical rather than abstract atemporal phenomena (for example, pure mathematics), are not clearly such that understanding them should involve any appreciation for their coming to be, or their being caused to exist. Proposes a framework for reducing objectual understanding to what he calls explanatory understanding. Explores the pros and cons with at least 2 credible sources. Pros and cons of epistemology shift Changes in epistemology even though they have received several criticisms they have significantly played a critical role in the advancement of technology. and (ii) what qualifies a group of beliefs as a system in the sense that is at issue when it is claimed that understanding involves grasping relationships or connections within a system of beliefs? ), The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations. Where is the Understanding? Synthese, 2015. Elgin (2007), like Zagzebski, is sympathetic to a weak factivity constraint on objectual understanding, where the object of understanding is construed as a fairly comprehensive, coherent body of information (2007: 35). One issue worth bringing into sharper focus is whether knowing a good and correct explanation is really the ideal form of understanding-why. Despite the fact that Copernicuss central claim was strictly false, the theory it belongs to constitutes a major advance in understanding over the Ptolemaic theory it replaced. While his view fits well with understanding-why, it is less obvious that objectual understanding involves grasping how things came to be. Explores the epistemological role of exemplification and aims to illuminate the relationship between understanding and scientific idealizations construed as fictions. Consider the view that the kinds of epistemic luck that suffice to undermine knowledge do not also undermine understanding. Of course, though, just as Lackey (2007) raises creationist teacher style cases against knowledge transmission principles, one might as well raise a parallel kind of creationist teacher case against the thesis that one cannot attain understanding from a source who herself lacks it. The possession of such judgment plausibly lines up more closely with ability possession (that is, (i)-(vi)) than with propositional attitude possession. Kelp, C. Understanding Phenomena. Synthese (2015). Finally, Section 6 proposes various potential avenues for future research, with an eye towards anticipating how considerations relating to understanding might shed light on a range of live debates elsewhere in epistemology and in philosophy more generally. Contains Lackeys counterexamples to the knowledge transmission principles. On the one hand, we have manipulationists, who think understanding involves an ability (or abilities) to manipulate certain representations or concepts. Cases of intervening luck taketo use a simple examplethe familiar pattern of Chisholms sheep in a field case, where an agent sees a sheep-shaped rock which looks just like a sheep, and forms the belief There is a sheep. So the kind of knowledge that it provides is metaknowledgeknowledge about knowledge. When considering interesting features that might set understanding apart from propositional knowledge, the idea of grasping something is often mentioned. An important observation Grimm makes is that merely assenting to necessary truths is insufficient for knowing necessary truths a priorione must also grasp orsee the necessity of the necessary truth. Morris suggests that the writer of the Comanche book might lack understanding due to failing to endorse the relevant propositions, while the reader might have understanding because she does endorse the relevant proposition. It is worth considering how and in what way a plausible grasping condition on understanding should be held to something like a factivity or accuracy constraint. Grimm does not make the further claim that understanding is a kind of know-howhe merely says that there is similarity regarding the object, which does not guarantee that the activity of understanding and know-how are so closely related. In all these cases, epistemology seeks to understand one or another kind of cognitive success (or, correspondingly, cognitive failure ). ), Epistemic Value. However, it is less clear at least initially that retreating from causal dependence to more general dependence will be of use in the kinds of objectual understanding cases noted above. It should be noted that Hills 2009: 7 is also sympathetic to a similar thought, suggesting that the threshold for understanding might be contextually determined. It is clearly cognitively better than the belief that humans did not evolve. This view, he notes, can make sense of the example (see 3(b))which he utilizes against manipulationists accountsof the omniscient, omni-understanding agent who is passive (that is, an omni-understanding agent who is not actively drawing explanatory inferences) as one would likely attribute to this agent maximally well-connected knowledge in spite of that passivity. reptarium brian barczyk; new milford high school principal; salisbury university apparel store 115, No. Janvid, M. Knowledge versus Understanding: The Cost of Avoiding Gettier. Acta Analytica 27 (2012): 183-197. In contrast with Pritchards partial compatibility view of the relationship between understanding and epistemic luck, where understanding is compatible with environmental but not with intervening luck, Rohwer (2014) defends understandings full compatibility with veritic epistemic luck (that is, of both intervening and environmental varieties). Dordecht: Springer, 2014. Pritchard, meanwhile, claims that the matter of understandings compatibility with epistemic luck can be appreciated only against the background of a distinction between two kinds of epistemic luckintervening and environmentalboth of which are incompatible with knowledge. Secondly, one might wonder if Wilkenfelds account of understanding as representation manipulation is too inclusivethat it rules in, as cases of bona fide understanding, representations that are based on inaccurate but internally consistent beliefs. The topic of epistemic value has only relatively recently received sustained attention in mainstream epistemology. However, epistemologists have recently started to turn more attention to the epistemic state or states of understanding, asking questions about its nature, relationship to knowledge, connection with explanation, and potential status as a special type of cognitive achievement. This point aligns with the datum that we often attribute understanding by degrees. More generally, though, it is important to note that Khalifa, via his grasping argument, is defending reliable explanatory evaluation as merely a necessarythough not sufficientcomponent of grasping. Divides recent views of understanding according to whether they are manipulationist or explanationst; argues for a different view according to which understanding is maximally well-connected knowledge. Our culture is shifting, Dede argues, not just from valuing the opinions of experts to the participatory culture of YouTube or Facebook, but from understanding knowledge as fixed and linear to a . De Regt, H. and Dieks, D. A Contextual Approach to Scientific Understanding. Synthese 144 (2005): 137-170. Moral Understanding and Knowledge. Philosophical Studies 172(2) (2015): 113-128. Contrary to premise (3), such abilities (of the sort referenced by Khalifa in premise 2 and 3) arguably need not involve discriminating between explanations, so long as one supposes that discriminating between explanations is something one has the reliable ability to do only if one could not very easily form a belief of the form when this is false. Discuss the pros and cons of the epistemological shift in an essay. epistemological shift pros and cons. Displacements of power in the realm of concepts accompany these new orientations. Hills (2009) is an advocate of such a view of understanding-why in particular. Grimm develops this original position via parity of reasoning, taking as a starting point that the debate about a priori knowledge, for example, knowledge of necessary truths, makes use of metaphors of grasping and seeing that are akin to the ones in the understanding debate. His modal model of understanding fits with the intuition that we understand not propositions but relations between parts to wholes or systems of various thoughts.. The root of the recent resurgence of interest in understanding in epistemology. In so doing, he notes that the reader may be inclined to add further internalist requirements to his reliability requirement, of the sort put forward by Kvanvig (2003). In recent years epistemology has experienced gradual changes that are critical in human life. Or, should we adopt a more relaxed view of what would be required to satisfy this conditionnamely, a view that focuses on the way the agent connects information. With each step in the sequence, we understand the motion of the planets better than we did before. Explanatory Knowledge and Metaphysical Dependence. In his Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Proponents of weak factivity must address both of these potentially problematic results. Since Kvanvig claims that the coherence-making relationships that are traditionally construed as necessary for justification on a coherentist picture are the very relations that one grasps (for example, the objects of grasping) when one understands, the justification literature may be a promising place to begin. If so, why, and if not why not? But most knowledge is not metaknowledge, and epistemology is therefore a relatively insignificant source of knowledge. ), The Continuum Companion to Epistemology. More specifically, Kvanvig aims to support the contention that objectual understanding has a special value knowledge lacks by arguing that the nature of curiositythe motivational element that drives cognitive machinery (2013: 152)underwrites a way of vindicating understandings final value. Argues against a factive conception of scientific understanding. Such a constraint would preserve the intuition that understanding is a particularly desirable epistemic good and would accordingly be untroubled by the issues highlighted for the weakest view outlined at the start of the section. Sliwa, P. IVUnderstanding and Knowing. There is debate about both (i) whether understanding-why might fairly be called explanatory understanding and (ii) how understanding-why might differ from propositional knowledge. This is the idea that one has shifted, or changed, the way he or she takes in knowledge. One natural place to start will be to examine the relationship between understanding and epistemic luck. Armed with this distinction, Pritchard criticizes Kvanvigs assessment of the Comanche case by suggesting that just how we should regard understanding as being compatible or incompatible with epistemic luck depends on how we fill out the details of Kvanvigs case, which is potentially ambiguous between two kinds of readings. Grimm, S. Understanding In S. Bernecker and D. Pritchard (eds. Emma C. Gordon Relatedly, Van Camp (2014) calls understanding a higher level cognition that involves recognizing connections between different pieces of knowledge, and Kosso (2007: 1) submits that inter-theoretic coherence is the hallmark of understanding, stating knowledge of many facts does not amount to understanding unless one also has a sense of how the facts fit together. While such remarks are made with objectual understanding (that is, understanding of a subject matter) in mind, there are similar comments about understanding-why (for example, Hills 2009) that suggest an overlapping need to consider connections between items of information, albeit on a smaller scale. A. and Gordon, E. C. On Pritchard, Objectual Understanding and the Value Problem. American Philosophical Quarterly 51 (2014): 1-14. For example, Kvanvig describes it as obtaining when understanding grammatically is followed by an object/subject matter, as in understanding the presidency, or the president, or politics (2003: 191). For example, we might require that the agent make sense of X in a way that is reasonablefew would think that the psychic above is reasonable, though it is beyond the scope of the current discussion to stray into exploring accounts of reasonableness. Hempel, C. Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. Although a large number of epistemologists hold that understanding is not a species of knowledge (e.g. At the other end of the spectrum, we might consider an extremely strong view of understandings factivity, according to which understanding a subject matter requires that all of ones beliefs about the subject matter in question are true. If the former, then this is unfortunate given the theoretical work the term is supposed to be doing in characterizing understanding. Finally, there is fruitful work to do concerning the relationship between understanding and wisdom. Outlines a view on which understanding something requires making reasonable sense of it. For example, Carter and Gordon (2011) consider that there might be cases in which understanding, and not just knowledge, is the required epistemic credential to warrant assertion. Here, and unlike in the case of intervening epistemic luck, nothing actually goes awry, and the fact that the belief could easily have been false is owed entirely to the agents being in a bad environment, one with faades nearby. As will see, a good number of epistemologists would agree that false beliefs are compatible with understanding. A restatement of Grimms view might accordingly be: understanding is knowledge of dependence relations. ), Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology. Consider here two cases she offers to this effect: EVOLUTION: A second graders understanding of human evolution might include as a central strand the proposition that human beings descended from apes. Strevens, M. No Understanding Without Explanation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013): 510-515. . Sullivan, E. Understanding: Not Know-How. Philosohpical Studies (2017). Hetherington, S. There Can be Lucky Knowledge in M. Steup, J. Turri and E. Sosa (eds. Due to the possibility of overly simple or passive successes qualifying as cognitive achievements (for example, coming to truly believe that it is dark just by looking out of the window in normal conditions after 10pm), Pritchard cautions that we should distinguish between two classes of cognitive achievementstrong and weak: Weak cognitive achievement: Cognitive success that is because of ones cognitive ability. The Psychology of Scientific Explanation. Philosophy Compass 2(3) (2007): 564-591. A more charitable interpretation of Bakers position would be to read making reasonable sense more strongly. Discusses and defines ability in the sense often appealed to in work on cognitive ability and the value of knowledge. Would this impede ones understanding? Taking curiosity to be of epistemic significance is not a new idea. He argues that we can gain some traction on the nature of grasping significant to understanding if we view it along such manipulationist lines. Understanding entails that such beliefs must be the result of exercising reliable cognitive abilities. Such discussions, though they can be initially helpful, raise a nest of further questions. Contains Kims classic discussion of species of dependence (for example, mereological dependence). Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975. Philosophy of Science, 79(1) (2012): 15-37. Riaz, A. Unsurprisingly, the comparison between the nature of understanding as opposed to knowledge has coincided with comparisons of their respective epistemic value, particularly since Kvanvig (2003) first defended the epistemic value of the latter to the former. Since, for instance, the ideal gas law (for example, Elgin 2007) is recognized as a helpful fiction and is named and taught as such, as is, nave Copernicanism or the simple view that humans evolved from apes. For example, we might suppose an agent has a maximally complete explanation of how Michelangelos David came into existence between 1501 and 1504, what methods were used to craft it, what Michelangelos motivating reasons were at the time, how much clay was used, and so on. There are three potential worries with this general style of approach. ), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Achievements, unlike mere successes, are regarded as valuable for their own sake, mainly because of the way in which these special sorts of successes come to be. Contains the famous counterexamples to the Justified True Belief account of knowledge. Epistemology is a way of framing knowledge, it defines how it can be produced and augmented. Hills, A. To complicate matters further, some of the philosophers who appear to endorse one approach over the other can elsewhere be seen considering a more mixed view (for example, Khalifa 2013b). In other words, S knows that p only if p is true. The distinctive aspects can be identified as human abilities to engage in mathematics and intellectual reasoning. ), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Running head: SHIFT IN EPISTEMOLOGY 1 Shift in Epistemology Student's Name Professor's Name Institution Some (for example, Gordon 2012) suggest that attributions of propositional understanding typically involve attributes of propositional knowledge or a more comprehensive type of understandingunderstanding-why, or objectual understanding (these types are examined more closely below). A central component of Kvanvigs argument is negative; he regards knowledge as ill-suited to play the role of satisfying curiosity, and in particular, by rejecting three arguments from Whitcomb to this effect. Toon, A. Pragmatism as an epistemological approach accentuates the reasoning of theories and concepts by studying their consequences and goals, values and interests they support. In other words, they claim that one cannot always tell that one understands. 824 Words. Epistemologically, a single-right-answer is believed to underlie each phenomenon, even though experts may not yet have developed a full understanding of the systemic causes that provide an accurate interpretation of some situations. This line merits discussion not least because the idea that understanding-why comes by degrees is often ignored in favor of discussing the more obvious point that understanding a subject matter clearly comes by degrees. For, even if understanding why 22=4 does not require a grasp of any causal relation, it might nonetheless involve a grasp of some kind of more general dependence, for instance the kind of dependence picked out by the metaphysical grounding relation. This view, while insisting that central beliefs must all be true, is flexible enough to accommodate that there are degrees of understandingthat is, that understanding varies not just according to numbers of true beliefs but also numbers of false, peripheral beliefs. A novel interpretation of the traditional view according to which understanding-why can be explained in terms of knowledge of causes. CA: Wadsworth, 2009. Elgin, C. Understanding and the Facts. Philosophical Studies 132 (2007): 33-42. Even so, and especially over the past decade, there has been agreement amongst most epistemologists working on epistemic value that that understanding is particularly valuable (though see Janvid 2012 for a rare dissenting voice). Fifthly, to what extent might active externalist approaches (for example, extended mind and extended cognition) in epistemology, the ramifications of which have recently been brought to bear on the theory of knowledge (see Carter, et. For example, I can understand the quadratic formula without knowing, or caring, about who introduced it. To the extent that these worries with transparency are apt, a potential obstacle emerges for the prospects of accounting for the value of understanding in terms of its transparency. On the basis of considerations Pritchard argues for in various places (2010; 2012; 2013; 2014), relating to cognitive achievements presence in the absence of knowledge (for example. An earlier paper defending the intellectualist view of know-how. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. In other words, each denies all of the others respective beliefs about the subject, and yet the weak view in principle permits that they might nonetheless understand the subject equally well. With a wide range of subtly different accounts of understanding (both objectual and understanding-why) on the table, it will be helpful to consider how understanding interfaces with certain key debates in epistemology. Kvanvig does not spell out what grasping might involve, in the sense now under consideration, in his discussion of coherence, and the other remarks we considered above. What is Justified Belief? In G. S. Pappas (ed. There is little work focusing exclusively on the prospects of a non-factive construal of understanding-why; most authors, with a few exceptions, take it that understanding-why is obviously factive in a way that is broadly analogous to propositional knowledge. (iv) an ability to draw from the information q the conclusion that p (or probably p), (v) an ability to give q (the right explanation) when given the information that p, and. This objection is worth holding in mind when considering any further positions that incorporate representation manipulability as necessary. London: Continuum, 2012. Uses the concept of understanding to underwrite a theory of explanation. To the extent that this is correct, there is some cause for reservation about measuring degrees of understanding according to how well they approximate the benefits provided by knowing a good and correct explanation. A proponent of Khalifas position might, however, view the preceding response as question-begging. Riggs, W. Understanding Virtue and the Virtue of Understanding In M. DePaul and L. Zagzebski (eds. Epistemological assumptions are those that focus on what can be known and how knowledge can be acquired (Bell, 8). It is the idea that one has shifted, or changed, the way he or she takes in knowledge (Rayner, 2011).The fact that taking in knowledge has altered is evident in learning institutions today. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. He wants us to suppose that grasping has two componentsone that is a purely psychological (that is, narrow) component and one that is the actual obtaining of the state of affairs that is grasped. What kind of historical enterprise is historical epistemology? In other words, even though there is no such gas as that referred to in the law, accepting the law need not involve believing the law to be true and thus believing there to be some gas with properties that it lacks. Since it is central to her take on human evolution, factivists like Kvanvig must conclude that her take on human evolution does not qualify as understanding. A worry about this move can be put abstractly: consider that if understanding entails true beliefs of form , and that beliefs of form must themselves be the result of exercising reliable cognitive abilities, it might still be that ones reliable -generating abilities are exercised in a bad environment.