Abstract
In the current discussion on epistemic value, several philosophers argue that understanding enjoys higher epistemological significance and epistemic value than knowledge—the epistemic state the epistemological tradition has been preoccupied with. By noting a tension between the necessary conditions for understanding in the perhaps most prominent of these philosophers, Jonathan Kvanvig, this paper disputes the higher epistemological relevance of understanding. At the end, on the basis of the results of the previous sections, some alternative comparative contrasts between knowledge and understanding are briefly explored, including one in which an analogue to the KK-principle for knowledge, the “UU-principle”, does not hold for a different reason than that for which the former principle fails.
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Notes
(Kvanvig 2003).
(Kvanvig 2003, 116). He poses the very demanding condition that “[a]n adequate account of the value of knowledge must explain why knowledge is more valuable than any subset of its constituents” (Kvanvig 2003, 112); that is, Kvanvig requires an explanation of the distinctive value knowledge is presumed to possess. The requirement that any definition of knowledge must explain why knowledge is more valuable than justified true belief is stated in (ibid. 58-9).
(Kvanvig 2003, 117). By “component-based”, Kvanvig means any account that attempts to base the value of knowledge solely on its components. To claim that the value of a fourth Gettier excluding condition resides in it distinguishing knowledge from other states is circular since it presupposes that knowledge has value, which that account has yet to explain, a point Kvanvig repeatedly stresses in (ibid. Ch 5).
The so called swamping problem may constitute an additional reason to shift focus from knowledge to understanding. This problem comes in different versions, but usually consists in the value of the epistemic constituent of knowledge, and thus knowledge itself, being wholly accounted for, thus “swamped”, by the value of true belief. The Gettier problem and the consequences Kvanvig draws from it are, however, independent from the swamping problem since the lack of value that any additional Gettier excluding conditions, and the resulting definition of knowledge, are faced with is due to their ugliness rather than their value being swamped by the value of true belief. The latter problem instead, at least primarily, precisely pertains to the third condition—the epistemic constituent of knowledge—and in virtue of this result knowledge itself. This is one reason why the swamping problem will not be discussed in this paper. Other reasons are given in sec. 2 as well as in note no. 23 below.
Kvanvig claims that understanding why, when, where and what can be derived from understanding that in (ibid. 189-90).
First quote (Kvanvig 2003, 191-2 and second 197). See also (Kvanvig 2009a, 96-7). One may wonder whether to these grasped relationships one should add (i) higher order beliefs about one’s first order beliefs and their internal relations that enables the subject to place them in “epistemic perspective”—to borrow from Sosa’s characterization of the broad coherence that constitutes reflective knowledge in (Sosa 2009, 191-3); a higher from of knowledge (contrasting with animal knowledge), which Kvanvig sees as similar to his view of understanding in several respects in (Kvanvig 2003, 206)—and (ii) grasp of properties of the theory, or “body of information”, as a whole beyond coherence, like comprehensiveness and fecundity, and perhaps also aesthetic properties like beauty and elegance as well. Stephen Grimm has convinced this author that that both (i) and (ii) may be present in understanding but that neither of them are essential to understanding. It may be the case that the properties under (ii) need to be present but not necessarily accessed by the understanding subject.
(Ibid. 200-2). For the relevant notion of justification involved see sec. 2 as well as notes no. 8 and 19 below.
Nor is the value of understanding swamped by the value of its constituent of true belief since Kvanvig holds that the “subjective justification” that comprises understanding, and as described above under the heading of “coherence”, serves as intentional rather than effective means to the goal of truth (ibid. 60-5 and 200). See sec. 2 and note no. 19 below.
(Kvanvig 2003, 197-9). In (Pritchard 2010) Pritchard claims that understanding-why is incompatible with the kind of luck that standard Gettier cases reveal just as knowledge is, but unlike knowledge in being compatible with “environmental luck” (ibid. 78-80), the kind of luck where the accidentality does not intervene between fact and belief, but instead is a feature of an epistemically hostile environment. His example of environmental luck that blocks knowledge is precisely to happen to see a real barn in barn façade country, whereas his example of environmentally lucky understanding is to come to understand why one’s house burnt down by being told so by a genuine fire officer amidst a large group of people dressed up as fire officers for a masquerade. However, since he contrasts understanding-why with “holistic” (i.e. objectual understanding?), his claim does not directly address Kvanvig’s thesis. However, if the fire example instead is transformed into a case of objectual understanding—you understand enough about fires to understand that houses can burn down because of faulty wiring—then Kvanvig may respond that such understanding may be present even if you instead receive this information from one of the dressed up masquerade guests, as long as the information passed on is true. You possess objectual understanding because the required internal grasping of relationships occurs within a body of true information. Moreover, it seems that it is precisely the lack of objectual understanding that explains why Pritchard’s son can know why the house burnt down by being told so by his father, but not understand why the house did so (ibid. 81). Pritchard’s ambition to separate knowing-why from understanding-why thus pushes understanding-why towards objectual understanding after all.
In (Kvanvig 2003, 201-2).
One may, for instance, wonder exactly why the Gettier problem poses such an insurmountable obstacle for any account that simultaneously attempts to explain the nature and value of knowledge. That any such attempt at solving the problem would result in ugly or messy gerrymandering, or to give the analysis another spin: be subject to ever increasing sophistication, may not constitute such a deterrent as Kvanvig expects—even if one insists that the extra Gettier case-excluding condition, and the resulting definition of knowledge, fulfills the very demanding conditions concerning value that he poses. For objections against the argument that any definition of knowledge that blocks Getterization would be “ugly” and hence not distinctively valuable, see (DePaul 2009).
It may be the case that Kvanvig, in fact, has a yet stronger version of the objection in mind to the traditional fixation with knowledge, one more in line with Reed’s “new” argument for skepticism in (Reed 2007 and 2009) that crucially relies on a certain analysis of the Gettier problem that shows some similarity to Kvanvig’s analysis. Reed argues that Gettier cases forces anyone accepting fallibilism into skepticism. According to Reed the Gettier problem is unsolvable for fallibilism and Kvanvig may intend his argument to reach the same conclusion. In that case, however, the step to knowledge not being as valuable as traditionally perceived would have to be different. Instead of showing that whatever the extra fourth condition that eliminates the Gettier cases looks like, this condition, and knowledge, will not be valuable in the way Kvanvig requires, the argument would rather be that we should not value the unattainable, especially since another valuable epistemic state, understanding, by contrast is attainable.
(Kvanvig 2009a, 97-9 and 107). Concerning the role that “folk intuitions” should play in epistemology, the favorite example of this author is that most colleagues and students assent to the claim that strawberries are berries while denying that bananas are even though the converse is, in fact, true. Why, then, should folk botany carry less weight than folk epistemology?
Incidentally, one may here question why the value of any necessary condition in the definition of knowledge should be “intuitively obvious” (Kvanvig 2003, 117); a desideratum that seems to stand in tension to his above mentioned suspicion towards folk linguistic “data” in philosophy. In other words, why should an account of the value of knowledge be less technical and rely more on “folk axiology” than an account of the nature of knowledge should rely on folk epistemology? For instance, we may rest content with the result that the finer details of the conditions on knowledge do not single out knowledge as more valuable than the other states, as long as both are more valuable than the states they are distinguished from at earlier stages of the analysis.
A mixture of examples taken from (Kvanvig 2009a, 99 and 103-4), partly as a response to an example construed by DePaul and Grimm in their review (DePaul and Grimm 2007, 512-3) of (Kvanvig 2003). See also the lucid discussion in (Grimm 2006). This author interprets Kvanvig’s discussion in (Kvanvig 2009a, 106-9) as suggesting that objectual understanding entails understanding-why (at least in determinist systems). Kvanvig writes that objectual understanding “involves”, but does not “imply” understanding-why (ibid, 106).
Thus illustrating a case where “two competing representations of the same part of reality cannot both constitute knowledge” that Zagzebski draws attention to in (Zagzebski 2001, 244).
By the way, this author was under the impression that the respondent and opponent switched sides midway through the disputation, but that was apparently not the case. However, the example still illustrates the spotted difficulty even if the two sides of the disputation are represented by two subjects rather than by one and the same subject. If one prefers one person representing both sides, then we could as the third example take the skeptic and leader of the Academy, Carneades who during a famous visit to Rome as part of an Athenian embassy in 155 B.C., upset the Roman audience by first giving a public speech praising justice and then the next day refuting his first speech by showing the advantages of injustice. His objectual understanding of the topic may in both cases be equally good even though both speeches cannot have a sound conclusion. This author regards providing good arguments both in favor of and against a thesis as a higher cognitive achievement than merely providing one side of the argument. Of course as a skeptic, Carneades did not believe in any of the theses or the arguments. The relation between belief and understanding is briefly touched upon in sec. 3 below.
In (Kvanvig 2009b, 342-3), as a response to (Elgin 2009). See (Riggs 2009) as well whose comments on understanding are also discussed by Kvanvig in that paper. Kvanvig mentions in passing someone who understands phlogiston theory but not combustion as such, but does not specify whether that subject understands that this theory is false.
Distinguishing between “understanding the claims of the theory and the understanding involved in taking the claims of the theory to be true” as Kvanvig does in another passage (in Kvanvig 2003, 201) to allow for the possibility of understanding inconsistent theories, may take care of the case of Carneades but won’t work for the Marxist historian, and we can spell out the medieval disputation in a way that makes the distinction inapplicable there as well. It is not completely clear to this author whether Kvanvig here holds that understanding the claims of the inconsistent theory entails understanding the theory to be inconsistent, but this author thinks he does. In any case, the Marxist historical theory is false, but presumably not inconsistent, so Kvanvig’s point does not affect that example, or the second one where the participants in the disputation naturally do not believe in the union of the posited proposition and its negation, nor does Carneades, but may rather believe in one of them, or be unsure about what alternative to believe, or not believe in any of them, just as in the case of Carneades. A participant who falsely believes the posited proposition (or its negation) would thus resemble the Marxist historian in this regard.
(Zagzebski 2001, 245).
(Kvanvig 2003, 60-5). He employs this distinction to argue that a reflectively transparent subjective justification, i.e. a form of justification constituting an intentional means to the truth, holds distinctive epistemic value not swamped by the value of true belief in (ibid. 65-7), which would be the case if justification would constitute an effective way of arriving at truth.
Grimm distinguishes, following Salmon, between “subjective” and “objective” understanding, where the former sense only requires an internal “fit” with the belief system of the subject whereas the latter requires an external fit with the world as well, in sec. 3 of (Grimm 2010). Due to the externalist sympathies of this author, this author is reluctant to grant subjective understanding any epistemic distinction per se.
See, however, a possible rejoinder from Kvanvig in (Kvanvig 2003, 145-6).
As noted by Pritchard in (Pritchard 2010, 75). (Zagzebski 2001, 246) writes
Understanding has internalist conditions for success, whereas knowledge does not. Even when knowledge is defined as true justified belief and justification is construed internalistically, the truth condition for knowledge makes it fundamentally a concept whose application cannot be demonstrated from the inside. Understanding, in contrast, not only has internally accessible criteria, but is a state that is constituted by a type of conscious transparency. It may be possible to know without knowing that one knows, but it is impossible to understand without understanding that one understands.
However, the aforementiond examples can be interpreted as counterexamples to a “UU-principle” to be formulated below in sec. 3.
Kaplan famously argues that it is justification that has priority and therefore that knowledge and the Gettier problem that follows in its wake do not matter in (Kaplan 1985).
The swamping problem may be one reason why these epistemologists would not prefer justification to understanding since they claim that the epistemic value of justification, and knowledge, is “swamped” by the epistemic value of true belief, whereas understanding as a cognitive achievement does possess a distinctive epistemic value that is not thus swamped, as Pritchard also claims in (Pritchard 2010, 83-4), once again with the proviso that he has understanding-why rather than objectual understanding in mind. As stated in note no. 19 above, Kvanvig himself holds that only “subjective justification” withstands the swamping problem, so that would be the form of justification he would rest content with; a form, moreover, that he at least in (Kvanvig 2003) regards as a constituent of objectual understanding.
As mentioned in note no. 4 above, this author regards the swamping problem qua problem, as well as any proposed solution, as an independent, additional and less fundamental problem compared to the kind of problem discussed in this paper. The swamping problem trades more on intuitions not shared by all epistemologists, including this author, like the existence of epistemic values distinct from practical ones. More importantly, however, the risk of lack of epistemic distinction of the abilities associated with understanding pointed out here is more fundamental than any solution these abilities may bring to the swamping problem, since unless these abilities themselves are genuinely epistemic, any additional value they possess would not be epistemic. In addition, a hypothesis, not to be explored further here, is that once you make the required abilities truth conducive and thus genuinely epistemic, then their epistemic value also become “swamped”.
Another being that the swamping problem then seems to arise for the epistemic value of such understanding as well. See notes no. 4 and 23.
X here does not vary over propositions, but over whatever objects of understanding objectual understanding takes. As remarked upon above, Kvanvig is not completely clear about what the objects of objectual understanding consist in. His use of the phrase “body of information” in (Kvanvig 2003 and 2009a), also employed in this paper, leaves open the crucial question discussed below as to whether one can understand a body of information without having beliefs concerning the truth of that body or being mistaken about its truth value. Given the factivity condition he poses on such understanding, Kvanvig seems to treat these bodies of information as being true, but this constraint is precisely what is at stake here. See sec. 1 of (Grimm 2010) for a lucid discussion of what the objects of understanding may be.
One respect in which the KK-principle and the UU-principle may not be analogous is that, unlike the former, the latter shifts from objectual understanding at the first level to propositional understanding at the second. This author is unsure whether such a shift actually takes place, both may be objectual, and also to what extent such a shift would affect the ensuing discussion below. Thanks to Jonas Olson whose comment prompted this remark.
In (Pritchard 2010, 76) Pritchard agrees with Zagzebski that understanding is not “opaque” in the usual sense that those who deny the KK-principle hold that knowledge is, by denying that subjects must have access to the knowledge relation, but does not consider the possibility of opaqueness concerning the relatum of the object of understanding.
Incidentally, if one adopts Grimm’s distinction between subjective and objective understanding (see note no. 19), then failure to access the relation may occur in that a subject may understand without understanding what kind of understanding her first level understanding amounts to because of the external fit requirement on objective understanding.
Another reason to hesitate is that objectual knowledge seems to consist in having knowledge of the propositions that comprise the object of knowledge, which is a reduction Kvanvig resists in the case of objectual understanding to propositional understanding. See (Kvanvig 2003, 197) and (Kvanvig 2009a, 100-2).
More precisely, even though the subject may need to have conditional beliefs of the form “If y is true, then z is true,” where y and z are constituents of the object of understanding x, the subject need not believe that y, z or x is true.
Grimm, on the contrary, holds belief too “thin” of a notion to capture the “richer” notion of grasping involved in understanding in (Grimm 2006, 531). Note, however, that he has understanding-why in mind rather than objectual understanding (although this author is unsure if, and to what extent, Grimm differentiates between these forms). In his later paper (Grimm 2010), he distinguishes between straightforward assent and the qualified assent that subjects who understand idealized or false theories give. Once again, however, unlike the examples discussed in this paper, these seem to be cases where the subjects understand that the theories in question are false or idealized. His distinction may allow for cases where the subject is hesitant to assent to the theory in question, but not for cases where the subject gives unqualified assent, like the Marxist historian. It thus seems that the grasping can occur independently of whether the subject gives qualified, unqualified assent or, as suggested in this paper, any assent at all.
Since the respondent, opponent and Carneades may not believe in the theory they understand, they thus in this respect resemble the scientist who is aware of the fictitious element in the theory in Elgin’s aforementioned example, even though they do not need to have precisely that belief, or any other, about the theory in question.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Albert Casullo, Stephen Grimm, Jonas Olson and participants at the Bled Conference “Wisdom and Understanding” in May-June 2011 for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Janvid, M. Knowledge versus Understanding: The Cost of Avoiding Gettier. Acta Anal 27, 183–197 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0144-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0144-y