Understanding in contemporary epistemology
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Date
27/06/2012Author
Gordon, Emma Catherine
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Abstract
My main aim is to contribute to the exploration of the nature of the epistemic state of
understanding. It seems that the most productive way in which this might be done is by
(i) investigating what sort of conditions must be fulfilled in order for one to understand,
and (ii) comparing understanding’s place in certain contemporary debates to the place
that knowledge has in those debates.
Regarding conditions for understanding, I will argue that there are two types of
understanding that are most relevant to epistemology—objectual understanding and
atomistic understanding. I will contend that atomistic understanding is entirely factive
while objectual understanding is moderately factive, that objectual understanding admits
of degrees, that both types involve some sort of grasp of explanatory relations, that both
possess a measure of luck immunity, and that both are cognitive achievements with
instrumental, teleological, contributory and (crucially) final value. It must be stressed
that the general accounts of both types of understanding that I attempt to provide are not
supposed to be exhaustive sets of necessary and sufficient conditions—I remain
particularly open to the possibility that there are further necessary conditions that are as
yet undiscovered, especially for objectual understanding.
Regarding understanding’s place in contemporary debates, it is perplexing that
existing work does not capitalise on the thought that treating understanding in
conjunction with many of the most prominent issues in recent epistemology is a
worthwhile project that could yield interesting and important results. I will summarise
understanding's potential significance for a number of these topics, looking at all of the
following (in varying degrees of detail): factivity, coherentism, norms of assertion, the
transmission of epistemic properties, epistemic luck, the nature of cognitive achievement, and epistemic value. This last topic is one that I think is particularly
important to an investigation into understanding, because it is quite plausible that there
is a particularly strong revisionist theory of epistemic value focused on understanding.
Such a view would be one on which knowledge is not finally valuable, but one by way
of which we could nonetheless explain why we might pre-theoretically think that
knowledge is finally valuable. Since revisionist views often involve a claim that we
should think of a different, closely related epistemic state as distinctively valuable, it is
natural to consider understanding as a prime candidate for the focus of such a theory.