He argues that intuitions that rule against lucky understanding can be explained away. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Perhaps, as Harvey (2006b) suggests, we do need to reconfigure academic protocols in order to make more room for these kinds of . What is Justified Belief? In G. S. Pappas (ed. 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). Khalifas indispensability argumentwhich he calls the Grasping Argument runs as follows: Khalifa is, in this argument stipulating that (1) is a ground rule for discussion (2013b: 5). An overview of the background, development and recent issues in epistemology, including a chapter on understanding as an epistemic good. Such a theory raises questions of its own, such as precisely what answering reliably, in the relevant sense, demands. So, on Grimms (2011) view, grasping the relationships between the relevant parts of the subject matter amounts to possessing the ability to work out how changing parts of that system would or would not impact on the overall system. This skeptical argument is worth engaging with, presumably with the goal of showing that understanding does not turn out to be internally indistinguishable from mere intelligibility. A novel interpretation of the traditional view according to which understanding-why can be explained in terms of knowledge of causes. 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. Zagzebski notes that this easily leads to a vicious circle because neglect leads to fragmentation of meaning, which seems to justify further neglect and further fragmentation until eventually a concept can disappear entirely.. ), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Examines reasons to suppose that attributions of understanding are typically attributions of knowledge, understanding-why or objectual understanding. This is a change from the past. Lucky Understanding Without Knowledge. Synthese 191 (2014): 945-959. Eds. Trout, J.D. epistemological shift pros and cons. Pritchard (2007) has put forward some ideas that may prevent the need to adopt a weak view of understandings factivity while nonetheless maintaining the key thrust of Elgins insight. A., Kallestrup, J. Palermos, S.O. Proponents of weak factivity must address both of these potentially problematic results. Riaz, A. A longer discussion of the nature of understanding and its distinctive value (in relation to the value of knowledge) than in his related papers. Kvanvig 2003; Zagzebski 2001; Riggs 2003; Pritchard 2010), Grimms view is rooted in a view that comes from the philosophy of science and traces originally to Aristotle. If the latterthat is, if we are to understand grasping literally, then, also unfortunately, we are rarely given concrete details of its nature. south east england accent; spend billionaires money game; kaplan data entry work from home. The notion of curiosity that plays a role in Kvanvigs line is a broadly inclusive one that is meant to include not just obvious problem-solving examples but also what he calls more spontaneous examples, such as turning around to see what caused a noise you just heard. 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. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0863-z. as in testimony cases in friendly environments, where knowledge acquisition demands very little on the part of the agent), he argues that cognitive achievement is not essentially wedded to knowledge (as robust virtue epistemologists would hold). He argues that we can gain some traction on the nature of grasping significant to understanding if we view it along such manipulationist lines. Here is one potential example to illustrate this point: consider that it is not clear that people who desire to understand chemistry generally care about the cause of chemistry. And, thirdly, two questions about what is involved in grasping can easily be run together, but should be kept separate. For example, you read many of your books on screens and e-readers today. He concedes, though, that sometimes curiosity on a smaller scale can be sated by epistemic justification, and that what seems like understanding, but is actually just intelligibility, can sate the appetite when one is deceived. Many epistemologists have sought to distinguish understanding from knowledge on the basis of alleged differences in the extent to which knowledge and understanding are susceptible to being undermined by certain kinds of epistemic luck. Longworth, G. Linguistic Understanding and Knowledge. Nous 42 (2008): 50-79. Although the analysis of the value of epistemic states has roots in Plato and Aristotle, this renewed and more intense interest was initially inspired by two coinciding trends in epistemology. Just as we draw a distinction between this epistemic state (that is, intelligibility, or what Grimm calls subjective understanding) and understanding (which has a much stricter factivity requirement), it makes sense to draw a line between grasping* and grasping where one is factive and the other is not. Orand this is a point that has received little attentioneven more weakly, can the true beliefs be themselves unreliably formed or held on the basis of bad reasons. Salmon, W. Four Decades of Scientific Explanation. In Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. Intervening epistemic luck is the sort present in the Gettiers original cases (1963) which convinced most epistemologists to abandon the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief. For the purposes of thinking about understanding, some of the most important will include: (i) what makes a system of beliefs coherent? 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. Although many chapters take as their starting point an analysis of how dominant political, educational, and musical ideologies serve to construct and sustain inequities and undemocratic practices, authors also identify practices that seek to promote socially just pedagogy and approaches to music education. Given the extent to which grasping is highly associated with understanding and left substantively unspecified, it is perhaps unsurprising that the matter of how to articulate grasping-related conditions on understanding has proven to be rather divisive. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975. This section considers the connection between understanding-why and truth, and then engages with the more complex issue of whether objectual understanding is factive. To the extent that such a move is available, one has reason to resist Morriss rationale for resisting Pritchards diagnosis of Kvanvigs case. Grimm (2006) and Pritchard (2010) counter that many of the most desirable instances of potential understanding, such as when we understand another persons psychology or understand how the world works, are not transparent. Email: emma.gordon@ed.ac.uk epistemological shift pros and cons. London: Continuum, 2012. 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.. That said, Hills adds some qualifications. Thirdly, even if one accepts something like a moderate factivity requirement on objectual understandingand thus demand of at least a certain class of beliefs one has of a subject matter that they be trueone can also ask further and more nuanced questions about the epistemic status of these true beliefs. Philosophy of Science, 79(1) (2012): 15-37. Grimm, S. The Value of Understanding. Philosophy Compass 7(2) (2012): 103-177. Consider here an analogy: a false belief can be subjectively indistinguishable from knowledge. Proposes a framework for reducing objectual understanding to what he calls explanatory understanding. Includes Alstons view of curiosity, according to which the epistemic value of true belief and knowledge partially comes from a link to curiosity. ), Knowledge, Virtue and Action. The Case of Richard Rorty A Newer Argument Pro: Hales's Defense o. Outlines and evaluates the anti-intellectualist and intellectualist views of know-how. One can split views on this question into roughly three positions that advocate varying strengths of a factivity constraint on objectual understanding. Toon (2015) has recently suggested, with reference to the hypothesis of extended cognition, that understanding can be located partly outside the head. For example, by trusting someone I should not have trusted, or even worse, by reading tea leaves which happened to afford me true beliefs about chemistry. For example, you read many of your books on screens and e-readers today. He claims that while we would generally expect her to have knowledge of her relevant beliefs, this is not essential for her understanding and as a result it would not matter if these true beliefs had been Gettierised (and were therefore merely accidentally true). The possession of such judgment plausibly lines up more closely with ability possession (that is, (i)-(vi)) than with propositional attitude possession. But most knowledge is not metaknowledge, and epistemology is therefore a relatively insignificant source of knowledge. Carter, J. Riggs, W. Why Epistemologists Are So Down on Their Luck. Synthese 158 (3) (2007): 329-344. Argues that we should replace the main developed accounts of understanding with earlier accounts of scientific explanation. If so, why, and if not why not? Elgin, C. Z. facebook android official. Knowledge is almost universally taken to be to be factive (compare, Hazlett 2010). In . Therefore, the need to adopt a weak factivity constraint on objectual understandingat least on the basis of cases that feature idealizationslooks at least initially to be unmotivated in the absence of a more sophisticated view about the relationship between factivity, belief and acceptance (however, see Elgin 2004). 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. Grimm anticipates this point and expresses a willingness to embrace a looser conception of dependence than causal dependence, one that includes (following Kim 1994) species of dependence such as mereological dependences (that is, dependence of a whole on its parts), evaluative dependences (that is, dependence of evaluative on non-evaluative), and so on. For example, while it is easy to imagine a person who knows a lot yet seems to understand very little, think of the student who merely memorizes a stack of facts from a textbook; it is considerably harder to imagine someone who understands plenty yet knows hardly anything at all. New York: Free Press, 1965. Khalifas (2013) view of understanding is a form of explanatory idealism. Nevertheless, considering weakly factive construals of objective understanding draws attention to an important pointthat there are also interesting epistemic states in the neighborhood of understanding.