Explaining Understanding

New Perspectives from Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

Stephen R. Grimm, Christoph Baumberger, Sabine Ammon, Stephen R. Grimm, Christoph Baumberger, Sabine Ammon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317414162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What does it mean to understand something? What types of understanding can be distinguished? Is understanding always provided by explanations? And how is it related to knowledge? Such questions have attracted considerable interest in epistemology recently. These discussions, however, have not yet engaged insights about explanations and theories developed in philosophy of science. Conversely, philosophers of science have debated the nature of explanations and theories, while dismissing understanding as a psychological by-product.

In this book, epistemologists and philosophers of science together address basic questions about the nature of understanding, providing a new overview of the field. False theories, cognitive bias, transparency, coherency, and other important issues are discussed. Its 15 original chapters are essential reading for researchers and graduate students interested in the current debates about understanding.

1 What is Understanding? An Overview of Recent Debates in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

Christoph Baumberger, Claus Beisbart, and Georg Brun

1 INTRODUCTION

Human beings strive for understanding of what is going on in the world. They want to understand why the planets take their specific orbits, how life came about, why some actions are morally wrong and so on. No wonder then that curricula at schools and universities often list understanding as one of the primary goals of education and training. And no surprise that the sciences and humanities, but also art and religion, promise a better understanding of the world or at least of some aspects of it.

But what exactly is understanding? What type of intellectual achievement does it constitute? What does it mean to understand why something is the case or how something has come about? These questions are at the center of recent debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. The aim of this chapter is to systematically overview the related research about understanding.

In some sense, philosophers’ preoccupation with understanding is not new. The very name of the philosophical discipline of epistemology derives from the ancient Greek word “episteme,” which may be translated as “understanding,” and episteme was already scrutinized by ancient philosophers. As a classic work in epistemology, Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus (1988, trans. Fowler) is devoted to the question of what episteme is and Theaetetus proposes that episteme is justified true belief (Theaetetus, 201c–d). Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1975 [1689]) and other important philosophical books refer to understanding in their titles. However, most of these works focus on knowledge (where “knowledge” is another translation of “episteme”) and not so much on what we now call understanding. Locke’s Essay, for instance, is about “the Original, Certainty, and Extent of humane Knowledge; together, with the Grounds and Degrees of Belief, Opinion, and Assent” (I.1.2). In the second half of the 20th century, epistemology was mainly concerned with the question of whether knowledge may be analyzed as justified true belief. The debate was sparked and shaped by counterexamples that Gettier (1963) raised against this account of knowledge.

What we now call understanding has thus not been a prominent topic in modern epistemology until very recently. However, understanding (in particular in its German translation, Verstehen) did play a crucial role in a philosophical discussion of how the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) differ from the sciences. Historian Droysen contrasted what he called Erklären (explanation) with Verstehen (understanding) and suggested that history calls for understanding while the physical sciences explain (Droysen 1868, Paras. 8 and 14). In Dilthey’s works about the foundations of the humanities, understanding is taken as their characteristic achievement (e.g. Dilthey 1910, 98–100; see Kögler and Stueber 2000 and Martin 2000 for the views of different classic Verstehen theorists). The logical positivists, by contrast, rejected a strict dichotomy between the sciences and humanities, and thus between explanation and understanding (e.g. Hempel 1942; see von Wright 1971 and Stueber 2012 for more recent contributions). It does not come as a surprise then that understanding surfaced in analytic philosophy of science in debates about scientific explanation. Explanation was taken to be primary and analyzed, for example, in terms of valid argument (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948), while understanding was merely regarded as a psychological byproduct or a pragmatic aspect of explanation (e.g. Hempel 1965, 413; see De Regt 2009 for a survey about views concerning the relationship between understanding and explanation).

Only recently, some epistemologists and philosophers of science have come to think that understanding is a cognitive achievement that needs to be addressed for its own sake. Works that pioneered this turn to understanding include Zagzebski (1996), Elgin (1996), and Kvanvig (2003) in epistemology, and Friedman (1974), Schurz and Lambert (1994), and De Regt and Dieks (2005) in philosophy of science. So far though, epistemologists have not much taken into account the works of philosophers of science, and vice versa.

In this survey, we focus on the nature of understanding and bracket related topics, such as the value of understanding. Like most authors in the debate, we are interested in understanding in general, rather than in a restricted or qualified form of understanding, such as moral understanding.

2 WHY IS UNDERSTANDING IMPORTANT?

But why bother about what understanding is? And why have so many philosophers turned their attention to understanding? There are at least three reasons for this trend, which partly turn on the general importance of understanding, but partly also on developments within philosophy.

First, understanding seems a central good that we try to realize when we think about the world. More specifically, the value of understanding seems to surpass that of knowledge (Kvanvig 2003, 2009a; Pritchard 2008; Gardiner 2012; Carter and Gordon 2014; see Whiting 2012 for a critical voice and Grimm 2012 for an overview). We can know something without understanding it. So achieving understanding seems an additional step forward, and we would not take this step if it did not have some additional value. Furthermore, knowledge may easily be acquired through the testimony of experts; understanding, by contrast, seems more demanding and requires that an epistemic agent herself puts together several pieces of information, grasps connections, can reason about causes, and this too suggests an added value.¹

If the value of understanding surpasses that of knowledge, then epistemology’s traditional focus on knowledge lacks legitimacy. In fact, philosophers have found it difficult to spell out why knowledge has a value that warrants an exclusive preoccupation with it (e.g. Kvanvig 2003). The problem of accounting for a supposed special value of knowledge is now called the value problem for knowledge (Pritchard 2010, ch. 1). Epistemology escapes this problem if it turns to understanding.

The second reason for devoting attention to understanding is that understanding is a central goal of the sciences. String theorist Greene (2008) goes so far as to characterize science in terms of understanding: “Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable.” Likewise, De Regt and Dieks (2005, 142) claim that “[u]nderstanding is an inextricable element of the aims of science.” If these voices get it right, any attempt to account for science and its achievements has to take understanding seriously, as has been explicitly urged by Elgin (2007, 34) and Kosso (2007, 173–4).

Even if understanding is not as central to science as some think, science is certainly concerned with explanations, and there seems to be a conceptual link between explanation and understanding: Explanations provide understanding, the latter being the goal of the former (Friedman 1974; Lipton 2004, 23; Grimm 2010). Any account of explanation has to account for this link (Friedman 1974), thus understanding should at least be of some interest to philosophers of science.

The third reason to look at understanding derives from developments within epistemology. According to the traditional account, knowledge requires justification. There are strong intuitions that the justification is internal to the epistemic agent, that is, that it is accessible to her, as so-called internalists have it (e.g. BonJour 1980). Likewise, there are strong intuitions that justification proceeds in a coherentist manner, that is, that a belief is justified by embedding it into a coherent web of beliefs, as so-called coherentists have it (e.g. BonJour 1985). Although the intuitions supporting internalism and coherentism seem deep-seated, it has proven difficult to save them in an account of knowledge. Internalism about epistemic justification is threatened by a regress problem (e.g. Bergmann 2006, ch. 1). Coherentists have a hard time to show how coherence is related to truth, which is supposed to be the aim of belief and a central feature of knowledge (see, e.g. BonJour 1985, ch. 8). However, an immediate access to the reasons for a belief and the ability to connect a belief with others seem to be central to understanding (Kvanvig 2003, 192). This suggests that internalist and coherentist intuitions have been misplaced: while being inappropriate in an account of knowledge, they spell out important features of understanding. Thus, an epistemology that does not restrict itself to knowledge, but takes into account understanding, too, can do better to accommodate our intuitions about our epistemic achievements in a broad sense (Greco 2010, 7–8). Likewise, it may also provide a home for intuitions that are articulated in virtue epistemology (Zagzebski 2001, 248). Nevertheless, the idea that an account of understanding may provide a better home for internalist, coherentist, and virtue-related intuitions has been challenged recently (e.g. by Greco 2014, Grimm 2016, and Khalifa 2016).

3 WHAT TYPES OF UNDERSTANDING ARE THERE?

There are good reasons then that philosophers scrutinize what understanding is. Before we can discuss accounts of understanding though, we have to ask whether there is one such thing named “understanding” or rather several types of understanding that each need their own analysis.

Everyday talk provides first hints about this question. At least the following epistemically relevant types of uses of the verb “to understand” can be distinguished:

1 S understands X [e.g. another person, a language, ...]

2 S understands that something is the case

3 S understands how something is the case [e.g. how something came about, how a tool functions]

4 S understands why something is the case

5 S understands what is the case [e.g. what somebody said]

6 S understands how something is of a certain quality [e.g. how something feels for somebody]

Further qualifications may specify, for example, a means/vehicle of understanding (S understands X by means of theory Y) or express that the understanding has a certain quality (S well understands that ...). Note also that “understand” is sometimes used as an intransitive verb, but this use seems derivative and presupposes that there is something that is understood (Kvanvig 2003, 189).

Thus, in all relevant uses, “understanding” relates a subject of understanding (S) to an object that is understood. In everyday attributions of understanding, S typically denotes an individual human being. It is an interesting question whether groups, institutions, or non-human animals may have understanding too, but since this question has hardly been addressed in the literature, we will leave it aside and assume that subjects of understanding are individual human beings. Classifications of understanding thus turn on the question of what is understood.

In this respect, (1)–(6) suggest three types of understanding, namely objectual (1), propositional (2), and interrogative understanding (3)–(6) (Baumberger 2011, 70–1; cf. Carter and Gordon 2014, 3). However, this distinction does not run very deep. For instance, understanding how a certain clock works (which would count as interrogative understanding) is the same as understanding the mode of operation of the clock (which would count as objectual understanding).

Even though language does not dictate a useful distinction of different types of understanding, we have to decide how we deal with the different uses of the words “to understand,” which give rise to what one may call “objectual,” “propositional,” and “interrogative” understanding. Things would certainly be simpler, if we could explain some uses in terms of others. We will discuss proposals to this effect in Section 5, but our impression is that the question of how the different uses of “understanding” hang together has not yet been settled. For the remainder of this survey we will concentrate on two specific uses, namely:

(OU) S understands some subject matter or domain of things;

(EU) S understands why something is the case.

Understanding referred to in the first type of use will be called “objectual,” while understanding referred to in the second type of use will be called “explanatory.” When we speak of understanding without qualification we refer to both objectual and explanatory understanding.

For a more refined typology of understanding, note first that there is a kind of understanding that is targeted at what is meant by linguistic expressions or by other symbols, for example, mathematical formulae or tube maps. We call this “symbolic understanding.” Understanding why something is the case, for example, why there was a volcanic eruption in Iceland in 2010, typically relies on symbolic understanding because it presumes the competent use of language or other symbols. But it is clearly not exhausted by symbolic understanding because it is concerned with how some part of the world is, independently of how we symbolize it. In recent debates about understanding, symbolic understanding is usually bracketed because it is supposed to be a topic of its own, which is best handled in a theory of symbols.²

Closely related to symbolic understanding is the understanding of representations such as theories and models. The understanding of quantum theory is a case in point. It partly turns on the use of symbols, for example, the symbol for the wave function, but clearly goes beyond this. Arguably, to understand quantum theory, you have to be able to apply it to simp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Guide to the Essays
• 1 What is Understanding? An Overview of Recent Debates in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science
• Part I Understanding and the Facts
• Part II Understanding and its Norms
• Part III Understanding and the Epistemic Agent
• Index