Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge

Khalifa, Kareem

doi:10.1017/9781108164276

Cited by 127 publications

(170 citation statements)

References 112 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

163

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This account of explanation covers various levels of intimacy between the explanation and understanding, from the ones in which explanation and understanding are the most distinct (meaning delivering understanding requires a great deal more of mediating knowledge), e.g. Strevens (2008Strevens ( , 2013 and Khalifa (2013Khalifa ( , 2017; to cases where the explanation has a minimal structure and the delivery of understanding is less mediated. This is a gradual view of explanation, according to which the less of the structure it has the more of the understanding it provides, and vice versa.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Even though, there are many different ways to think of understanding and its relation to the explanation and knowledge, none of them have explicitly treated the relation between the structure of explanation and understanding specifically. To avoid circularity when using the 6 terms "grasping" and "understanding" in referring to the structure of explanation, following Strevens (2008Strevens ( , 2013 and Khalifa (2017) I distinguish between "understanding-that" and "understanding-why". Understanding-that refers to some basic cognitive abilities such as being a competent speaker of a language, knowing what certain mathematical relations mean, grasping the mathematical axioms and knowing what it means to say that they are logically primitive, or knowing that something is a fact.…”

Section: However It Is Very Important To Distinguish What Is Minimalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The views about the relation between explanation and understanding range from largely dismissive (Hempel 1948;Trout 2002) which see the scientific understanding as a pragmatic or psychological by-product of explanation which is not a proper subject of philosophical inquiry, and which should rather belong to psychology; to proposals to treat the understanding independently from the explanation i.e. that there could be understanding without explanation (Lipton 2009;Schurz and Lambert 1994;Newman 2013Newman , 2015, or on the other hand, that there could not be understanding without explanation (Strevens 2008(Strevens , 2013Khalifa 2012Khalifa , 2017.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Minimal Structure Explanations, Scientific Understanding and Explanatory Depth

Kostić

2019

Perspectives on Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Phone: +33 (0) 768890295Acknowledgements: I thank Kareem Khalifa and Philippe Huneman for their extremely helpful comments on this paper. I owe a great deal of gratitude to Isabelle Drouet, Francesca Merlin, Umut Baysan and Cyrille Imbert for their comments on the very first draft of this paper. I also thank the participants of the workshops "Unifying the debates: mathematical and noncausal explanations" and "Understanding from models" as well as Duško Prelević for their very insightful discussions of various versions of this paper. AbstractIn this paper, I outline a heuristic for thinking about the relation between explanation and understanding that can be used to capture various levels of "intimacy", between them. I argue that the level of complexity in the structure of explanation is inversely proportional to the level of intimacy between explanation and understanding, i.e. the more complexity the less intimacy. I further argue that the level of complexity in the structure of explanation also affects the explanatory depth in a similar way to intimacy between explanation and understanding, i.e. the less complexity the greater explanatory depth and vice versa.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: However It Is Very Important To Distinguish What Is Minimalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Minimal Structure Explanations, Scientific Understanding and Explanatory Depth

Kostić

2019

Perspectives on Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Roughly, we genuinely understand why p in that we know that some explanans is true, and that a certain explanatory relation between the explanans and the explanandum actually holds – and this is the end of the story. Khalifa (, pp. 14, 79) also contends that “talk of grasping can always be replaced by a more specific epistemic status (e.g., approximately true beliefs, […], scientific knowledge)” and that “grasping isn't special.…”

Section: Graspingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Testimony Transmit Understanding?

Malfatti

2020

Theoria

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Can we transmit understanding via testimony in more or less the same way in which we transmit knowledge? The standard view in social epistemology has a straightforward answer: no, we cannot. Three arguments supporting the standard view have been formulated so far. The first appeals to the claim that gaining understanding requires a greater cognitive effort than acquiring testimonial knowledge does. The second appeals to a certain type of epistemic trust that is supposedly characteristic of knowledge transmission (and maybe of the transmission of epistemic goods in general) and that is allegedly incompatible with understanding. The third aims to show that there is a certain aspect of understanding (what epistemologists these days like to call “grasping”) that cannot be passed on to another person via testimony alone. In this article, I show that all of these arguments can be resisted. Thus, there seem to be no compelling reasons to embrace the standard view.

show abstract

“…Understanding why E is clearly closely associated with having an explanation of E, but it is less clear that objectual understanding requires having or knowing an explanation. While such explanatory accounts of objectual under-standing enjoy considerable popularity (e.g., Strevens, 2013;de Regt, 2017;Khalifa, 2017), others have argued that objectual understanding of P does not require that one has an explanation of any aspect of P (e.g., Lipton, 2009;Kvanvig, 2009;Gijsbers, 2013). Two non-explanatory views have gained traction, viz.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Explanation: Understanding as Dependency Modelling

Dellsén

2020

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents and argues for an account of objectual understanding that aims to do justice to the full range of cases of scientic understanding, including cases in which one does not have an explanation of the understood phenomenon. According to the proposed account, one understands a phenomenon just in case one grasps a suciently accurate and comprehensive model of the ways in which it or its features are situated within a network of dependence relations; one's degree of understanding is proportional to the comprehensiveness and accuracy of such a model. I compare this account with accounts of scientic understanding that explicate understanding in terms of having an explanation of the understood phenomenon. I discuss three distinct types of cases in which scientic understanding does not amount to possessing an explanation of any kind, and argue that the proposed model-based account can accommodate these cases while still retaining a strong link between understanding and explanation.

show abstract

Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge

Cited by 127 publications

References 112 publications

Minimal Structure Explanations, Scientific Understanding and Explanatory Depth

Minimal Structure Explanations, Scientific Understanding and Explanatory Depth

Can Testimony Transmit Understanding?

Beyond Explanation: Understanding as Dependency Modelling

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About