Abstract
What exactly do we need in order to enjoy the cognitive benefit that is supposed to be provided by an explanation? Some philosophers (most notably Khalifa in Philos Sci 79(1):15–37, 2012, Episteme 10(1):1–17, 2013, Eur J Philos Sci 5(3):377–385, 2015, Understanding, explanation, and scientific knowledge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017) would say that all that we need is to know the explanation. Others (e.g. Newman in Int Stud Philos Sci 26(1):1–26, 2012; Strevens in Stud Hist Philos Sci Part A 44(3):510–515, 2013) would say that achieving understanding with the help of an explanation requires more than that, that it requires a grasping or an understanding of the explanation. My aim in this paper is to come up with a new answer to this problem by exploring the shortcomings of the received view of understanding. In my view, besides having (at least) testimonial knowledge of an explanation, obtaining explanatory understanding requires full cognitive access to the explanation.
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Notes
I will say more below about this kind of situations (i.e. situations in which one fails to understand even though one possesses all the information needed to make sense of the explanation).
As it is well known, there are many types of understanding that make the object of philosophical study. So, in order to avoid confusion, it is important to specify from the beginning which type of understanding the present study is concerned with. My concern in this paper is only with the kind of understanding one can arrive at with the help of a scientific explanation. Also, by scientific explanations I mean those explanations given in natural sciences. I don't know to what extent what I am saying here also applies to what is going on in human and social sciences so I will adopt a cautious attitude. For instance, I am not sure that it applies to the idiographic explanations found in psychology and psychiatry, i.e. to those explanations which are supposed to be the product of a kind of qualitative research resembling the verstehen approach from sociology and anthropology.
In Newman’s view “understanding a scientific explanation is a cognitive achievement constituted by our having made appropriate referential, causal, logical, as well as coherence inferences on information we encode into memory as knowledge” (Newman 2012, p. 15).
For example Zagzebski (2001), Kvanvig (2003), Grimm (2006), Hills (2016) to name just a few. As it is said in Grimm (2006), “when trying to offer an account of understanding the notion of grasping arises almost irresistibly” (p. 532). Of course, ‘grasping’ doesn’t have the same meaning for all these philosophers.
Or reading it, of course.
By “making sense of an explanation,” what I mean here is not something akin to linguistic understanding, but having all the information and the theoretical tools necessary for seeing how the different parts of an explanation fit together in an explanatorily-relevant way.
That this is so can be easily shown by pointing to the fact that there are other accounts in the literature (e.g. Strevens 2013) that tie understanding with explanations but take obtaining understanding from explanations to involve more than just being in the possession of an explanation.
Several passages from Hempel (1965) suggest that he uses the term ‘theoretical understanding’ as nothing more than a synonym for ‘scientific explanation’ (see, for example, the remarks made on p. 139 and p. 257).
Salmon is saying, indeed, e.g. in Salmon (1989, pp. 134–135, 1993, p. 14), that our understanding has something to do with knowledge of causal mechanisms (among other things) but it is hasty to deduce from this that he takes knowledge of explanatory information to be the necessary and sufficient condition for obtaining understanding with the help of explanations.
What is asked in this question is if we can deduce an answer to question II from one’s answer to question I.
For Grimm’s argument, see Grimm (2014, pp. 337–338). Of course, Grimm’s aim is not to argue for KRV. From what I know, nobody uses this kind of argument as I do here, but I believe that an advocate of Khalifa’s received view can be sympathetic to Grimm’s approach (or better, my way of interpreting it in this context).
For the sake of the argument, I adopt here Grimm’s characterization of belief in terms of the act of assent: “to believe that something is so is to assent to the claim that things are so” (Grimm 2006, p. 531).
This doesn’t have to be the case, though. One can adopt instead Cohen’s (1992) acceptance account of knowledge. According to this account, there are cases in which knowledge that p implies that one accepts that p (even if not believing that p) and that the proposition that p deserves acceptance in the light of cognitively relevant circumstances (p. 88). From this perspective, the fact that Joan doesn’t have what it takes to believe the explanation doesn’t prevent her from knowing it, because she certainly accepts it and the explanation undoubtedly deserves acceptance. This way of responding to the Grimm-inspired KRV strategy for dealing with the figure skater case is not my favourite though, because I believe that Joan does have what it takes for belief formation.
Khalifa discusses the following case: “one may come to know that natural selection explains why species evolve through the testimony of an expert, while being ignorant about most of the details concerning natural selection and evolution” (p. 21).
Khalifa doesn’t explicitly state this, but I believe that without assuming something like this his answer would not make much sense since the person in his example is obviously lacking non-explanatory knowledge.
Some readers may not agree that my interpretation of the quoted paragraph fits with what Khalifa actually meant to say there, and so all this could be regarded as an attack on a straw-man. This doesn’t make the discussion irrelevant, though, because, no matter what path an advocate of Khalifa’s received view chooses to take, she needs to argue that non-explanatory knowledge can affect somehow explanatory power, and all such arguments run into the same kind of problems as discussed here.
Paraphrased from Pritchard (2008, p. 334).
I follow here the exposition in Allen (2007, p. 104).
P’…, p’ and q’ stand for the frequencies of alleles and genotypes in the next generation.
According to Khalifa and Gadomski, in order to be a reliable explanatory evaluator, one “must be able to generate plausible potential explanations, gather and use evidence to make comparative assessments, employ the theoretical virtues to make comparative assessments, and form the appropriate doxastic attitudes on the basis of these assessments” (p. 385).
Of course, in those cases, we accept that testimony is a good source of explanatory knowledge. But that is ok because the grasping argument is silent about the characteristic source of explanatory knowledge.
If we adopt the view espoused in Khalifa and Gadomski (2013) according to which explanatory knowledge is true belief produced by reliable explanatory evaluations, then we are forced to accept that we cannot acquire knowledge of explanations via testimony. This, of course, implies that very few people actually have genuine knowledge of explanations, because the usual way in which we gain such knowledge is by reading books, or by interacting with other people, and very few of us engage in explanatory evaluation.
See Reutlinger and Saatsi (2018) for a recent overview of the literature on non-causal explanations.
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Târziu, G. How Do We Obtain Understanding with the Help of Explanations?. Axiomathes 31, 173–197 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-020-09488-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-020-09488-6