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? On the weakest view, one can understand a subject matter even if none of ones beliefs about that subject matter are true. For example, you read many of your books on screens and e-readers today. This is the idea that one has shifted, or changed, the way he or she takes in knowledge. Understanding in Epistemology | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2015 Jun;21(3):433-9. doi: 10.1111/jep.12282. Boston: Routledge, 2013. It focuses on means of human knowledge acquisition and how to differentiate the truth knowledge claims from the false one. To the extent that this is right, Zagzebski is endorsing a kind of KU principle (compare: KK). 115, No. (2007: 37-8). Emma C. Gordon epistemological shift pros and cons - hashootrust.org.pk Many seem to blend manipulationism with explanations, suggesting for example that what is required for understanding is an ability associated with mentally manipulating explanations. The proponent of moderate factivity owes an explanation. 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. Morris, K. A Defense of Lucky Understanding. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (2012): 357-371. According to Grimm, cases like Kvanvig admit of a more general characterisation, depending on how the details are filled in. A good example here is what Riggs (2003) calls intelligibility, a close cousin of understanding that also implies a grasp of order, pattern and connection, but does not seem to require a substantial connection to truth. Kvanvig identifies the main opponent to his view, that the scope of curiosity is enough to support the unrestricted value of understanding, to be one on which knowledge is what is fundamental to curiosity. Having abandoned the commitment to absolute space, current astronomers can no longer say that the Earth travels around the sun simpliciter, but must talk about how the Earth and the sun move relative to each other. Much of the philosophical tradition has viewed the central epistemological problems concerning perception largely and sometimes exclusively in terms of the metaphysical responses to skepticism. Alston, W. Beyond Justification: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. 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 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. That is, we often describe an individual as having a better understanding of a subject matter than some other person, perhaps when choosing whom to approach for advice or when looking for someone to teach us about a subject. He suggests that manipulating the system allows the understander to see the way in which the manipulation influences (or fails to influence) other parts of the system (2011: 11). Shift in Epistemology.edited.docx - Running head: SHIFT IN Pritchards (2010) account of the distinctive value of understanding is, in short, that understanding essentially involves a strong kind of finally valuable cognitive achievement, and secondly, that while knowledge comes apart from cognitive achievement in both directions, understanding does not. If a grasping condition is necessary for understanding, does one satisfy this condition only when one exercises a grasping ability to reflect how things are in the world? 1pt1): pp. For example, he attempts to explain the intuitions in Pritchards intervening luck spin on Kvanvigs Comanche case by noting that some of the temptation to deny understanding here relates to the writer of the luckily-true book himself lacking the relevant understanding. A novel interpretation of the traditional view according to which understanding-why can be explained in terms of knowledge of causes. An earlier paper defending the intellectualist view of know-how. facebook android official. Perhaps the strongest of these is his suggestion that while the faculty of rational insight is indispensable to the grasping account of a priori, it is actually essential to knowledge of causes that it not be grasped through rational insight. However, advocates of moderate approaches to the factivity of understanding are left with some difficult questions to answer. A restatement of Grimms view might accordingly be: understanding is knowledge of dependence relations. Toon, A. For the purposes of thinking about understanding, some of the most important will include: (i) what makes a system of beliefs coherent? To defend the claim that possessing the kinds of abilities Hills draws attention to is not a matter of simply having extra items of knowledgeshe notes that one could have the extra items of knowledge and still lack the good judgment that allows you to form new, related true beliefs. This entry surveys the varieties of cognitive success, and some recent efforts to understand some of those varieties. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Includes criticism of Kvanvigs line on epistemic luck and understanding. Outlines and evaluates the anti-intellectualist and intellectualist views of know-how. (For example, is it a kind of knowledge, another kind of propositional attitude, an ability, and so on? Hempel, C. Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. 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. This is explained in the following way: If it is central to ordinary cognitive function that one is motivated to pursue X, then X has value in virtue of its place in this functional story. Regarding the comparison between the value of understanding and the value of knowledge, then, he will say that if understanding is fundamental to curiosity then this provides at least a partial explanation for why it is superior to the value of knowledge. 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). Carter, J. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. 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). 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. Strevens (2013) focuses on scientific understanding in his discussion of grasping. Carter, J. Argues that understanding (unlike knowledge) is a type of cognitive achievement and therefore of distinctive value. Offers an account of understanding that requires having a theory of the relevant phenomenon. 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. Argues against the view that moral understanding can be immune to luck while moral knowledge is not. epistemological shift pros and cons - oshawanewhome.ca Running head: SHIFT IN EPISTEMOLOGY 1 Shift in Epistemology Student's Name Professor's Name Institution Discuss the pros and cons of the epistemological shift in an essay Sliwa 2015, however, defends a stronger view, according to which propositional knowledge is necessary and sufficient for understanding. In short, then, Kvanvig wants to insist that the true beliefs that one attains in acquiring ones understanding can all be Gettiered, even though the Gettier-style luck which prevents these beliefs from qualifying as knowledge does not undermine the understanding this individual acquires. 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. On this basis Pritchard insists that Grimms analogy breaks down. 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). The Nature of Ability and the Purpose of Knowledge. Philosophical Issues 17 (2007): 57-69. Ginet, C. Knowledge, Perception and Memory. epistemological shift pros and cons. Although a range of epistemologists highlighting some of the important features of understanding-why and objectual understanding have been discussed, there are many interesting topics that warrant further research. Hazlett, A. ), Epistemic Value. This broader interpretation seems well positioned to handle abstract object cases, for example, mathematical understanding, when the kind of understanding at issue is understanding-why. Grimm has put his finger on an important commonality at issue in his argument from parity. Argues that requiring knowledge of an explanation is too strong a condition on understanding-why. One reason a manipulationist will be inclined to escape the result in this fashion (by denying that all-knowing entails all-understanding) is precisely because one already (qua manipulationist) is not convinced that understanding can be attained simply through knowledge of propositions. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0863-z. Includes Alstons view of curiosity, according to which the epistemic value of true belief and knowledge partially comes from a link to curiosity. An epistemological shift: from evidence-based medicine to Khalifa, K. Inaugurating understanding or repackaging explanation. It seems as though understanding would possibly be undermined in a case where someone relying on the ideal gas law failed to appreciate it as an idealization. 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. In addition, it is important to make explicit differences in terminology that can sometimes confuse discussions of some types of understanding. Bradford, G. The Value of Achievements. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94(2) (2013): 204-224. Goldman, A. Lucky Understanding Without Knowledge. Synthese 191 (2014): 945-959. Morris challenges the assumption that hearers cannot gain understanding through the testimony of those who lack understanding, and accordingly, embraces a kind of understanding transmission principle that parallels the kind of knowledge transmission principle that is presently a topic of controversy in the epistemology of testimony. Hills thinks that moral understanding, if it were any kind of propositional knowledge at all, would be knowing a proposition under a practical mode and not necessarily under a theoretical mode.. 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. 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. DePaul, M. Ugly Analysis and Value in A. Haddock, A. Millar and D. Pritchard (eds. 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. He considers that grasping might be a modal sense or ability that allows the understander to, over and above registering how things are. London: Routledge, 2009. Description Recall that epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Wilkenfeld (2013) offers the account that most clearly falls under Kelps characterization of manipulationist approaches to understanding. His central claim is that curiosity provides hope for a response-dependent or behaviour-centred explanation of the value of whatever curiosity involves or aims at. sustainability scholarship 2021; lost vape centaurus replacement panels; Explores the pros and cons with at least 2 credible sources. What is Justified Belief? In G. S. Pappas (ed. 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). 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. Kelp points out that this type of view is not so restrictive as to deny understanding to, for example, novice students and young children. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975. Is it a kind of knowledge, another kind of propositional attitude, an ability, and so forth? For example, in Whitcomb (2011) we find the suggestion that theoretical wisdom is a form of particularly deep understanding. He suggests that the primary object of a priori knowledge is the modal reality itself that is grasped by the mind and that on this basis we go on to assent to the proposition that describes these relationships. As such, his commentary here is particularly relevant to the question of whether gasping is factive. Fourthly, a relatively fertile area for further research concerns the semantics of understanding attribution. 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. iwi galil ace rs regulate; pedestrian killed in london today; holly woodlawn biography; how to change icon size in samsung s21; houston marriott westchase Owing to Kvanvigs use of the words perceived achievement, Grimm thinks that the curiosity account of understandings value suggests that subjective understanding (or what is referred to as intelligibility above) can satisfy the desire to make sense of the world or really marks the legitimate end of inquiry.. 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. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. An overview of wisdom, including its potential relationship to understanding. body positive tiktok accounts; tough guise 2 summary sparknotes; tracking polls quizlet For example, you read many of your books on screens and e-readers today. 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? (iii) an ability to draw from the information that q the conclusion that p (or that probably p). Thirdly, and perhaps most interestingly, objectual understanding is attributed in sentences that take the form I understand X where X is or can be treated as a body of information or subject matter. Whitcomb (2010) notes that Goldman (1999) has considered that the significance or value of some item of knowledge might be at least in part determined by whether, and to what extent, it provides the knower with answers to questions that they are curious about. 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. Stanley, J and Williamson, T. Knowing How. Journal of Philosophy 98(8) (2001): 411-444. Elgin, C. Exemplification, Idealization, and Understanding in M. Surez (ed. Knowledge is almost universally taken to be to be factive (compare, Hazlett 2010). Considers some of the ramifications that active externalist approaches might have for epistemology. 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. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Meanwhile, he suggests that were you to ask a fake fire officer who appeared to you to be a real officer and just happened to give the correct answer, it is no longer plausible (by Pritchards lights) that you have understanding-why. Philosophy of Science, 79(1) (2012): 15-37. If, as robust virtue epistemologists have often insisted, cognitive achievement is finally valuable (that is, as an instance of achievements more generally), and understanding necessarily lines up with cognitive achievement but knowledge only sometimes does, then the result is a revisionary story about epistemic value. The epistemological shift in the present in the study - Course Hero His alternative suggestion is to propose explanation as the ideal of understanding, a suggestion that has as a consequence that one should measure degrees of understanding according to how well one approximate[s] the benefits provided by knowing a good and correct explanation. Khalifa submits that this line is supported by the existence of a correct and reasonably good explanation in the background of all cases of understanding-why that does not involve knowledge of an explanationa background explanation that would, if known, provide a greater degree of understanding-why. Where should an investigation of understanding in epistemology take us next? An in-depth exploration of different types of epistemic luck. Analyzes Kvanvigs Comanche case and argues that knowledge and understanding do not come apart in this example. Epistemology - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Defends views that hold explanation as indispensable for account of understanding and discusses what a non-factive account of grasping would look like. Pragmatism as an epistemological approach accentuates the reasoning of theories and concepts by studying their consequences and goals, values and interests they support. 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. The advances are clearly cognitive advances. In such a case, Kvanvig says, this individual acquires an historical understanding of the Comanche dominance of the Southern plains of North America from the late 17th until the late 19th century (2003: 197). 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. Why We Dont Deserve Credit for Everything We Know. Synthese 156 (2007). Put generally, according to the coherentist family of proposals of the structure of justified belief, a belief or set of beliefs is justified, or justifiably held, just in case the belief coheres with a set of beliefs, the set forms a coherent system, or some variation on these themes (Olsson 2012: 1). 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. 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. Criticizes the claim that understanding-why should be identified with strong cognitive achievement. He argues that intuitions that rule against lucky understanding can be explained away. It is also becoming an increasingly popular position to hold that understanding is more epistemically valuable than knowledge (see Kvanvig 2003; Pritchard 2010). This allows the agent to produce a slightly different mental representation of the subject matter that enables efficacious inferences pertaining to (or manipulations of) the subject matter. 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. Make sure you cite them appropriately within your paper, and list them in APA format on your Reference page. Sliwa, P. IVUnderstanding and Knowing. It will accordingly be helpful to narrow our focus to the varieties of understanding that feature most prominently in the epistemological literature. 1. Goldman, A. Hills (2009) is an advocate of such a view of understanding-why in particular. New York: Routledge, 2011. 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. Furthermore, Section 3 considers whether characterizations of understanding that focus on explanation provide a better alternative to views that capitalize on the idea of manipulating representations, also giving due consideration to views that appear to stand outside this divide. What is the grasping relation? Working hypotheses and idealizations need not, on this line, be viewed as representative of realityidealizations can be taken as useful fictions, and working hypotheses are recognized as the most parsimonious theories on the table without thereby being dubbed as wholly accurate. Displacements of power in the realm of concepts accompany these new orientations. Another seemingly promising lineone that engages with the relation question discussed aboveviews grasping as intimately connected with a certain set of abilities. Nonetheless, Zagzebski thinks that believing this actually allows us more understanding for most purposes than the vastly more complicated truth owing to our cognitive limitations. The Pros And Cons Of Epistemology. In looking at moral understanding-why, outlines some key abilities that may be necessary to the grasping component of understanding. However, Elgin takes this line further and insists thatwith some qualificationsfalse central beliefs, and not merely false peripheral beliefs, are compatible with understanding a subject matter to some degree. Often-cited discussion of the fake barn counterexample to traditional accounts of knowledge that focus on justified true belief. Specifically, Hills outlines six different abilities that she takes to be involved in grasping the reasons why pabilities which effectively constitute, on her view, six necessary conditions for understanding why p. These six abilities allow one to be able to treat q as the reason why p, not merely believe or know that q is the reason why p. They are as follows: (i) an ability to follow another persons explanation of why p. (ii) an ability to explain p in ones own words. In such a parallel case, we simply modify Lackeys original case and suppose that Stella, a creationist teacher, who does not believe in evolution, nonetheless teaches it reliably and in accordance with the highest professional standards. Argues that we should replace the main developed accounts of understanding with earlier accounts of scientific explanation. I side with positivism; which states knowledge can be found via empirical observations (obtained through the senses). The surgeons successful bypass is valued differently when one is made aware that it was by luck that he picked an appropriate blood vessel for the bypass. Grimm thinks the metaphor involves something like apprehending how things stand in modal space (that is, that there are no possible worlds in which the necessary truth is false). The Epistemological Shift from Descartes to Nietzsche: Intuition and If Kelps thought experiment works, manipulation of representations cannot be a necessary condition of understanding after all. Salmon, W. Four Decades of Scientific Explanation. In Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. Kelp (2015) makes a helpful distinction between two broad camps here. 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. Since what Grimm is calling subjective understanding (that is, Riggss intelligibility) is by stipulation essentially not factive, the question of the factivity of subjective understanding simply does not arise. 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