A restatement of Grimms view might accordingly be: understanding is knowledge of dependence relations. Strevens (2013) focuses on scientific understanding in his discussion of grasping. Pritchards verdict is that we should deny understanding in the intervening case and attribute it in the environmental case. These similar states share some of the features we typically think understanding requires, but which are not bona fide understanding specifically because a plausible factivity condition is not satisfied. In his article "A Seismic Shift in Epistemology" (2008), Chris Dede draws a distinction between classical perceptions of knowledge and the approach to knowledge underpinning Web 2.0 activity. sustainability scholarship 2021; lost vape centaurus replacement panels; Suppose further that the agent could have easily ended up with a made-up and incorrect explanation because (unbeknownst to the agent) everyone in the vicinity of the genuine fire officer who is consulted is dressed up as fire officers and would have given the wrong story (whilst failing to disclose that they were merely in costume). This would be the non-factive parallel to the standard view of grasping. Contrast thiscall it the intervening reading of the casewith Pritchards corresponding environmental reading of the case, where we are to imagine that the agent is reading a reliable academic book which is the source of many true beliefs she acquires about the Comanche. The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education His central claim in his recent work is that understanding can be viewed as knowledge of causes, though appreciating how he is thinking of this takes some situating, given that the knowledge central to understanding is non-propositional. 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. The underlying idea in play here is that, in short, thinking about how things would be if it were true is an efficacious way to get to further truths; an insight has attracted endorsement in the philosophy of science (for example, Batterman 2009). Rohwer, Y. And, thirdly, two questions about what is involved in grasping can easily be run together, but should be kept separate. 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. Grimm (2011) calls this subjective understanding. He describes subjective understanding as being merely a grasp of how specific propositions interlinkone that does not depend on their truth but rather on their forming a coherent picture. Lipton, P. Understanding Without Explanation in H. de Regt, S. Leonelli, and K. Eigner (eds. For example, you read many of your books on screens and e-readers today. Khalifa, K. Is Understanding Explanatory or Objectual? Synthese 190(6) (2013a): 1153-1171. in barn faade cases, where environmental luck is incompatible with knowledge but compatible with cognitive achievement) and the absence of cognitive achievement in the presence of knowledge (e.g. But most knowledge is not metaknowledge, and epistemology is therefore a relatively insignificant source of knowledge. 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. Includes further discussion of the role of acceptance and belief in her view of understanding. As will see, a good number of epistemologists would agree that false beliefs are compatible with understanding. 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? Achievements are thought of as being intrinsically good, though the existence of evil achievements (for example, skillfully committing genocide) and trivial achievements (for example, competently counting the blades of grass on a lawn) shows that we are thinking of successes that have distinctive value as achievements (Pritchard 2010: 30) rather than successes that have all-things-considered value. New York: Routledge, 2011. Specifically, he points out that an omniscient agent who knows everything and intuitively therefore understands every phenomenon might do so while being entirely passivenot drawing interferences, making predictions or manipulating representations (in spite of knowing, for example, which propositions can be inferred from others). According to Elgin, a factive conception of understanding neither reflects our practices in ascribing understanding nor does justice to contemporary science. A Seismic Shift in Epistemology | EDUCAUSE Drawing from Stanley and Williamson, she makes the distinction between knowing a proposition under a practical mode of presentation and knowing it under a theoretical mode of presentation. Stanley and Williamson admit that the former is especially tough to spell out (see Glick 2014 for a recent discussion), but it must surely involve having complex dispositions, and so it is perhaps possible to know some proposition under only one of these modes of presentation (that is, by lacking the relevant dispositions, or something else). The epistemological shift in the present in the study - Course Hero To what extent do the advantages and disadvantages of, for example, sensitive invariantist, contextualist, insensitive invariantist and relativist approaches to knowledge attributions find parallels in the case of understanding attributions. 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. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback) (Vol. Goldman, A. As Elgin (2007) notes, it is normal practice to attribute scientific understanding to individuals even when parts of the bodies of information that they endorse diverge somewhat from the truth. The Case of Richard Rorty A Newer Argument Pro: Hales's Defense o. Sliwa 2015, however, defends a stronger view, according to which propositional knowledge is necessary and sufficient for understanding. 1pt1): pp. 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. The advances are clearly cognitive advances. Though in light of this fact, it is not obvious that understanding is the appropriate term for this state. What are the advantages and disadvantages of epistemology as - Quora Philosophy of Science, 79(1) (2012): 15-37. 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.. epistemological shift pros and cons - roci.biz Defends the strong claim that propositional knowledge is necessary and sufficient for understanding. It is plausible that a factivity constraint would also be an important necessary condition on objectual understanding, but there is more nuanced debate about the precise sense in which this might be the case. (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. In the study of epistemology, philosophers are concerned with the epistemological shift. But more deeply, atemporal phenomena such as mathematical truths have, in one clear sense, never come to be at all, but have always been, to the extent that they are the case at all. Such a theory raises questions of its own, such as precisely what answering reliably, in the relevant sense, demands. philos201 Assignment Details Recall that epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. The context-sensitive element of Wilkenfelds account of understanding allows him to attribute adequate understanding to, for example, a student in an introductory history class and yet deny understanding to that student when the context shifts to place him in a room with a panel of experts. His conception of mental representations defines these representations as computational structures with content that are susceptible to mental transformations. Wilkenfeld constructs a necessary condition on objectual understanding around this definition. According to Goldman (1991) curiosity is a desire for true belief; by contrast, Williamson views curiosity as a desire for knowledge. In looking at moral understanding-why, outlines some key abilities that may be necessary to the grasping component of understanding. If the latterthat is, if we are to understand grasping literally, then, also unfortunately, we are rarely given concrete details of its nature. Toon, A. An overview of the background, development and recent issues in epistemology, including a chapter on understanding as an epistemic good. For example, Hills (2009: 4) says you cannot understand why p if p is false (compare: S knows that p only if p). In particular, one might be tempted to suggest that some of the objections raised to Grimms non-propositional knowledge-of-causes model could be recast as objections to Khalifas own explanation-based view. Explores understanding as the proper goal of inquiry, in addition to discussing understandings distinctive value. 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. This is a change from the past. Wilkenfeld (2013) offers the account that most clearly falls under Kelps characterization of manipulationist approaches to understanding. The group designated explanationists by Kelp (2015) share a general commitment to the idea that knowledge of explanations should play a key role in a theory of understanding (for example, Hempel 1965; Salmon 1989; Khalifa 2012; 2013). Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology. Ethics 120 (2009): 94-127. 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. CA: Wadsworth, 2009. Introduces intelligibility as an epistemic state similar to understanding but less valuable. Riggs, W. Why Epistemologists Are So Down on Their Luck. Synthese 158 (3) (2007): 329-344. What is Justified Belief? In G. S. Pappas (ed. 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. Lackey, J. Discuss the pros and cons of the epistemological shift in an essay. In . Epistemology is often defined as the theory of knowledge, and talk of propositional knowledge (that is, S knows that p) has dominated the bulk of modern literature in epistemology. An important question is whether there are philosophical considerations beyond simply intuition to adjudicate in a principled way why we should think about unifying understanding cases in one way rather than the other. In the first version, we are to imagine that the agent gets her beliefs from a faux-academic book filled with mere rumors that turn out to be luckily true. Defends views that hold explanation as indispensable for account of understanding and discusses what a non-factive account of grasping would look like. ), Knowledge, Virtue and Action. New York: Routledge, 2011. If so, then the internally consistent delusion objection typically leveled against weakly nonfactive views raises its head. Where should an investigation of understanding in epistemology take us next? This is because Stella lacks beliefs on the matter, even though the students can gain understanding from her. In short: understanding is causal propositional knowledge. Gordon, E. C. Is There Propositional Understanding? Logos & Episteme 3 (2012): 181-192. 2015 Jun;21(3):433-9. doi: 10.1111/jep.12282. Section 5 considers questions about what might explain the value of understanding; for example, various epistemologists have made suggestions focusing on transparency, distinctive types of achievement and curiosity, while others have challenged the assumption that understanding is of special value. In particular, he wants to propose a non-propositional view that has at its heart seeing or grasping, of the terms of the casual relata, their modal relatedness, which he suggests amounts to seeing or grasping how things might have been if certain conditions had been different. To be clear, the nuanced view Grimm suggests is that while understanding is a kind of knowledge of causes, it is not propositional knowledge of causes but rather non-propositional knowledge of causes, where the non-propositional knowledge is itself unpacked as a kind of ability or know-how. Another significant paper endorsing the claim that knowledge of explanations should play a vital role in our theories of understanding. Is it a kind of knowledge, another kind of propositional attitude, an ability, and so forth? One can split views on this question into roughly three positions that advocate varying strengths of a factivity constraint on objectual understanding. We could, for convenience, use the honorific term subjective knowledge for false belief, though in doing so, we are no longer talking about knowledge in the sense that epistemologists are interested in, any more than we are when, as Allan Hazlett (2010) has drawn attention to, we say things like Trapped in the forest, I knew I was going to die; Im so lucky I was saved. Perhaps the same should be said about alleged subjective understanding: to the extent that it is convenient to refer to non-factive states of intelligibility as states of understanding, we are no longer talking about the kind of valuable cognitive achievement of interest to epistemologists. DePaul, M. and Grimm, S. Review Essay: Kvanvigs The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2007): 498-514. Of course, many interrelated questions then emerge regarding coherence. Fourthly, a relatively fertile area for further research concerns the semantics of understanding attribution. Meanwhile, when discussing outright (as opposed to ideal) understanding, Kelp suggests that we adopt a contextualist perspective. Argues that the ordinary concept of knowledge is not factive and that epistemologists should therefore not concern themselves with said ordinary concept. Contains Kims classic discussion of species of dependence (for example, mereological dependence). Pritchard, D. Knowledge and Understanding in A. Fairweather (ed. Moderate factivity implies that we should withhold attributions of understanding when an agent has a single false central belief, even in cases where the would-be understanding is of a large subject matter where all peripheral beliefs in this large subject matter are true. (For example, is it a kind of knowledge, another kind of propositional attitude, an ability, and so on? Sliwa, P. IVUnderstanding and Knowing. He leaves grasping at the level of metaphor or uses it them literally but never develops it. The Value of Understanding In D. Pritchard, A. Haddock and A. Millar (eds. Early defence of explanations key role in understanding. Bradford, G. Achievement.