Argues against the view that moral understanding can be immune to luck while moral knowledge is not. Discusses and defines ability in the sense often appealed to in work on cognitive ability and the value of knowledge. The proponent of moderate factivity owes an explanation. Zagzebski, L. Recovering Understanding In M. Steup (ed. Relation question: What is the grasping relationship? 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. One can split views on this question into roughly three positions that advocate varying strengths of a factivity constraint on objectual understanding. An epistemological shift: from evidence-based medicine to epistemological responsibility J Eval Clin Pract. Questions about when and what type of understanding is required for permissible assertion connect with issues related to expertise. ), Scientific Understanding: Philosophical Perspectives. Making such an epistemological shift can then open up the possibility of communication with other-than-human persons in ways that few educational researchers seem able (or willing) to acknowledge (see Harvey, 2003). sustainability scholarship 2021; lost vape centaurus replacement panels; 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. For example, in Whitcomb (2010: 8), we find the observation that understanding is widely taken to be a higher epistemic good: a state that is like knowledge and true belief, but even better, epistemically speaking. Meanwhile, Pritchard (2009: 11) notes as we might be tempted to put the point, we would surely rather understand than merely know. A helpful clarification here comes from Grimm (2012: 105), who in surveying the literature on the value of understanding points out that the suggestion seems to be that understanding (of a complex of some kind) is better than the corresponding item of propositional knowledge. In other words, one mistakenly take knowledge to be distinctively valuable only because knowledge often does have somethingcognitive achievementwhich is essential to understanding and which is finally valuable. For one thing, abstract objects, such as mathematical truths and other atemporal phenomena, can plausibly be understood even though our understanding of them does not seem to require an appreciation of their coming to existence. Relatedly, if framed in terms of credence, what credence threshold must be met, with respect to propositions in some set, for the agent to understand that subject matter? 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. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975. 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.. But when the object of understanding why is essentially evaluativefor example, understanding why the statue is beautifulit seems that the quality of ones understanding could vary dramatically even when we hold fixed that one possesses a correct and complete explanation of how the statue came to be (that is, both a physical and social description of these causes). New York: Routledge, 2011. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Grimm puts the template formulation as follows: A Comanche-style case is one in which we form true beliefs on the basis of trusting some source, and either (a) the source is unreliable, or (b) the source is reliable, but in the current environment one might easily have chosen an unreliable source. After analysing variations of the Comanche case so conceived, Grimm argues that in neither (a)- or (b)-style Comanche cases do knowledge and understanding come apart. Wilkenfeld, D. Understanding as Representation Manipulability. Synthese 190 (2013): 997-1016. In this sense, the history of thought can be seen as the sometimes imperceptibly fluid, sometimes bizarre and abrupt, movements of our concepts. If making reasonable sense merely requires that some event or experience make sense to the epistemic agent herself, Bakers view appears open, as Grimm (2011) has suggested, to counterexamples according to which an agent knows that something happened and yet accounts for that occurrence by way of a poorly supported theory. What kind of historical enterprise is historical epistemology? Pragmatism as an epistemological approach accentuates the reasoning of theories and concepts by studying their consequences and goals, values and interests they support. Argues that the concerns plaguing theories of knowledge do not cause problems for a theory of understanding. As such, Khalifa is not attempting to provide an analysis of grasping. An overview of the object, psychology, and normativity of understanding. 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. The agents belief is justified and true, thanks to the fact that there is a genuine sheep hiding behind the rock, but the belief is not knowledge, as it could easily have been false. 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. A more charitable interpretation of Bakers position would be to read making reasonable sense more strongly. 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. Riggs, W. Why Epistemologists Are So Down on Their Luck. Synthese 158 (3) (2007): 329-344. Assume that the surgeon is suffering from the onset of some degenerative mental disease and the first symptom is his forgetting which blood vessel he should be using to bypass the narrowed section of the coronary artery. Such cases she claims feature intervening luck that is compatible with understanding. View Shift in Epistemology.docx from SOCIOLOGY 1010 at Columbia Southern University. This entry surveys the varieties of cognitive success, and some recent efforts to understand some of those varieties. Moral Understanding and Knowledge. Philosophical Studies 172(2) (2015): 113-128. Secondly, she concedes that it is possible that in some cases additional abilities must be added before the set of abilities will be jointly sufficient. For example, Kvanvig (2003) holds that understanding is particularly valuable in part because it requires a special grasp of explanatory and other coherence-making relationships. Riggs (2003: 20) agrees, stating that understanding of a subject matter requires a deep appreciation, grasp or awareness of how its parts fit together, what role each one plays in the context of the whole, and of the role it plays in the larger scheme of things (italics added). Disputes the popular claim that understanding is more epistemically valuable than knowledge. More generally, as this line of criticism goes, sometimes we simply mistake mere (non-factive) intelligibility for understanding. So too does the fact that one would rather have a success involving an achievement than a mere success, even when this difference has no pragmatic consequences. Finally, on the other side of the spectrum from Zagzebski and Kvanvig, and also in opposition with Pritchard, is the view that understandings immunity to epistemic luck is isomorphic to knowledges immunity to epistemic luck. For one thing, if understanding is both a factive and strongly internalist notion then a radical skeptical argument that threatens to show that we have no understanding is a very intimidating prospect (as Pritchard 2010:86 points out). For those who wonder about whether the often-discussed grasping associated with understanding might just amount to the possession of further beliefs (rather than, say, the possession of manipulative abilities), this type of view may seem particularly attractive (and comparatively less mysterious). Displacements of power in the realm of concepts accompany these new orientations. In a given context, then, one understands some subject matter P only if one approximates fully comprehensive and maximally well-connected knowledge of P closely enough that one is sufficiently likely to successfully perform any task relating to P that is determined by the context, assuming that one has the skills needed to do so and to exercise them in suitably favorable conditions. epistemological shift pros and cons. The next section considers some of the most prominent examples of attempts to expand on or replace a grasping condition on understanding. 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. The medical epistemology we propose conforms to the epistemological responsibility of doctors, which involves a specific professional attitude and epistemological skills. A. and Gordon, E. C. Norms of Assertion: The Quantity and Quality of Epistemic Support. Philosophia 39(4) (2011): 615-635. facebook android official. 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). 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. New York: Routledge, 2011. Discuss the pros and cons of the epistemological shift in an essay. An overview of the background, development and recent issues in epistemology, including a chapter on understanding as an epistemic good. Grimm, S. Is Understanding a Species of Knowledge? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (2006): 515-535. Make sure you cite them appropriately within your paper and list them in APA format on your Reference page. That is, there is something defective about a scientists would-be understanding of gas behavior were that scientist, unlike all other competent scientists, to reject that the ideal gas law is an idealization and instead embraced it as a fact. Argues that we should replace the main developed accounts of understanding with earlier accounts of scientific explanation. And, thirdly, two questions about what is involved in grasping can easily be run together, but should be kept separate. 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. Her line is that understanding-why involves (i) knowing what something is, and (ii) making reasonable sense of it. Discuss the pros and cons of the epistemological shift in an essay. These retractions do not t seem to make sense on the weak view. bella vista catholic charities housing; wills point tx funeral homes; ptvi triathlon distance; is frankie beverly in the hospital; birria tacos long branch; Outlines a view on which understanding something requires making reasonable sense of it. Lackey, J. While Pritchards point here is revealed in his diagnosis of Kvanvigs reading of the Comanche case, he in several places prefers to illustrate the idea with reference to the case in which an agent asks a real (that is, genuine, authoritative) fire officer about the cause of a house fire and receives a correct explanation. 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). A view on which the psychics epistemic position in this case qualifies as understanding-why would be unsatisfactorily inclusive. Pritchard (2008: 8) points out thatfor exampleif one believes that ones house burned down because of the actions of an arsonist when it really burnt down because of faulty wiring, it just seems plain that one lacks understanding of why ones house burned down. Of course, many interrelated questions then emerge regarding coherence. The Psychology of Scientific Explanation. Philosophy Compass 2(3) (2007): 564-591. As such, his commentary here is particularly relevant to the question of whether gasping is factive. Hence, he argues that any propositional knowledge is derivative. 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. Scotland, U.K. A Weak Factivity Constraint on Objectual Understanding, Moderate Views of Objectual Understandings Factivity, Understanding as Representation Manipulability, Understanding as Well-Connected Knowledge, Understanding as (Partially) Compatible with Epistemic Luck, Newer Defenses of Understandings Compatibility with Epistemic Luck. He argues that we can gain some traction on the nature of grasping significant to understanding if we view it along such manipulationist lines. . 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. However, advocates of moderate approaches to the factivity of understanding are left with some difficult questions to answer. 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. 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. 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. Kvanvig, J. To the extent that this is right, Zagzebski is endorsing a kind of KU principle (compare: KK). Pritchard, D. Knowing the Answer, Understanding and Epistemic Value. Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (2008): 325-39. 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. 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. Her main supporting example is of understanding the rate at which objects in a vacuum fall toward the earth (that is, 32 feet per second), a belief that ignores the gravitational attraction of everything except the earth and so is therefore not true. (2007: 37-8). ), The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding. Many of these questions have gone largely unexplored in the literature. Includes Alstons view of curiosity, according to which the epistemic value of true belief and knowledge partially comes from a link to curiosity. Contains a discussion of the fact that we often take ourselves to understand things we do not. 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). It also allows attributions of understanding in the presence of peripheral false beliefs, without going so far as to grant that understanding is present in cases of internally consistent delusionsas such delusions will feature at least some false central beliefs. 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.. Kelp points out that this type of view is not so restrictive as to deny understanding to, for example, novice students and young children. 4 Pages. Your paper should be 3-4 pages in length, not counting the Title page and Reference . 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. What is it to have this ability to modify some mental representation? 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). For example, Hills (2009: 4) says you cannot understand why p if p is false (compare: S knows that p only if p). Considers some of the ramifications that active externalist approaches might have for epistemology. Must they be known or can they be Gettiered true beliefs? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. In other words, they claim that one cannot always tell that one understands. 13. 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. Call these, for short, the relation question and the object question. 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.. 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. Given that the result is the same (that is, the patients heart muscle blood supply is improved) regardless of whether he successfully completes the operation by luck or by skill, the instrumental value of the action is the same. 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. 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. A longer discussion of the nature of understanding and its distinctive value (in relation to the value of knowledge) than in his related papers. 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.. 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. Zagzebskis weak approach to a factivity constraint aligns with her broadly internalist thinking about what understanding actually does involvenamely, on her view, internal consistency and what she calls transparency. A theoretical advantage to a weak factivity constraint is that it neatly separates propositional knowledge and objectual understanding as interestingly different. Janvid, M. Knowledge versus Understanding: The Cost of Avoiding Gettier. Acta Analytica 27 (2012): 183-197. ), The Continuum Companion to Epistemology. 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. Van Camp, W. Explaining Understanding (or Understanding Explanation. European Journal for Philosophy of Science 4(1) (2014): 95-114. However, Pritchards work on epistemic luck (for example, 2005) and how it is incompatible with knowledge leads him to reason that understanding is immune to some but not all forms of malignant luck (that is, luck which is 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. This is the idea that one has shifted, or changed, the way he or she takes in knowledge.