furnrenn mandee delphyn
Ping Weafer
To most scientists, and to those interested in the sciences, understanding is the ultimate aim of scientific endeavor. In spite of this, understanding, and how it is achieved, has received little attention in recent philosophy of science. Scientific Understanding seeks to reverse this trend by providing original and in-depth accounts of the concept of understanding and its essential role in the scientific process. To this end, the chapters in this volume explore and develop three key topics: understanding and explanation, understanding and models, and understanding in scientific practice.
Earlier philosophers, such as Carl Hempel, dismissed understanding as subjective and pragmatic. They believed that the essence of science was to be found in scientific theories and explanations. In Scientific Understanding, the contributors maintain that we must also consider the relation between explanations and the scientists who construct and use them. They focus on understanding as the cognitive state that is a goal of explanation and on the understanding of theories and models as a means to this end.
The chapters in this book highlight the multifaceted nature of the process of scientific research. The contributors examine current uses of theory, models, simulations, and experiments to evaluate the degree to which these elements contribute to understanding. Their analyses pay due attention to the roles of intelligibility, tacit knowledge, and feelings of understanding. Furthermore, they investigate how understanding is obtained within diverse scientific disciplines and examine how the acquisition of understanding depends on specific contexts, the objects of study, and the stated aims of research.
Henk de Regt is a philosophy lecturer at VU University Amsterdam. He has published on the history and philosophy of science, with a focus on scientific explanation and understanding. He is co-founder of the European Philosophy of Science Association and of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice.
Understanding is a protean concept in philosophy, and the desire forunderstanding is pervasive in everyday life. Scientists take it astheir goal to understand the world and how it works, teachers andparents hope to transmit understanding to their students and children,and from a political and social point of view we often strive formutual understanding.
Understanding seems to be different than knowledge in both respects.For one thing, understanding typically seems harder to acquire, andmore of an epistemic accomplishment, than knowledge (Pritchard 2010).For another, the objects of understanding seem more structured andinterconnected (Zagzebski 2019). Thus the subject matters we try tounderstand are often highly complex (quantum mechanics, the U.S. CivilWar), and even when we try to understand isolated events (such as thespilling of my coffee cup), we typically do so by drawing connectionswith other events (such as the jostling of the table by my knee).
Although understanding as an epistemic good was largely neglected bymodern epistemologists in favor of theorizing about knowledge (orrelated epistemic properties, such as justification and rationality),it reappeared as a central object of concern at the end of thetwentieth century, for a few different reasons.
While the notion of understanding was often simply neglected inepistemology, in the philosophy of science it was for many yearsactively downplayed. A primary figure in this dynamic was Carl Hempel(see especially Hempel 1965). Although Hempel helped bring the notionof explanation back into respectability in the philosophy of science,he had significant reservations about tying explanation too closely tothe notion of understanding.
At least at first glance, the objects of understanding appear to be sovaried that it is not obvious where one might find a common thread.Thus, we can understand fields of study, particular states of affairs,institutions, other people, and on and on (cf. Elgin1996: 123).
Kim argues that Hempel is a paradigm example of an explanatoryinternalist (Kim 1994 [2010]; cf. 1999 [2010]). For instance, supposethat one wants to explain and hence understand why a particular bar ofmetal began to rust (McCain 2016: ch. 9). A good Hempelian explanationwould be one in which a sentence describing the rusting followsinferentially from (a) a statement of the initial conditions (themoisture in the air, the constitution of the bar) and (b) a furtherlaw-like statement connecting the moisture, the constitution of thebar, and the onset of rust.
An explanatory externalist by comparison holds that the basicconnections or relationship one grasps, when one understands, are notlogico-linguistic but metaphysical. What you grasp, when youunderstand why the metal began to rust, are not primarilyrelationships among your beliefs or their contents. Rather, youprimarily grasp real, mind-independent relationships that obtain inthe world.
Central to the notion of understanding are various coherence-likeelements: to have understanding is to grasp explanatory and conceptualconnections between various pieces of information involved in thesubject matter in question. Such language involves a subjectiveelement (the grasping or seeing of the connections in question) and amore objective, epistemic element. The more objective, epistemicelement is precisely the kind of element identified by coherentists ascentral to the notion of epistemic justification or rationality, asclarified, in particular, by Lehrer (1974), BonJour (1985) and Lycan(1988). (Kvanvig 2018: 699)
explanation locates something in actuality, showing its actualconnections with other things, while understanding locates itin a network of possibility, showing the connections it would have toother nonactual things or processes. (Nozick 1981: 12; cf. Grimm2008)
Appreciating the contrast between vehicle of understanding and objectof understanding helps to reveal that in addition to pure internalistviews about the object of understanding (where the objects ofunderstanding are logico-linguistic relations), and pure externalistviews (where the objects are worldly), there are also possible hybridviews.
According to another hybrid approach, the internal logical orprobabilistic relationships do not mirror the relationshipsout there in the world, but rather provide evidence for theexistence of relationships out there in the world. Thus some hold thatwhen things go well an appreciation or grasp of the probabilisticconnections among the various things we believe allows us to infer theexistence of real causal connections in the world (seeSpirtes, Glymour, & Scheines 1993; Pearl 2000 [2009]). AsWesley Salmon characterizes an earlier version of this idea,
Emily Sullivan, for instance, claims that even if we grant thatunderstanding involves abilities, it does not follow that there issomething special about understanding from a psychological point ofview, because ordinary propositional knowledge itself requiresabilities (Sullivan 2018). Thus I can apparently only know that thetraffic light is red, in the actual world, if I would have gotten thecolor right in close possible worlds as well. More generally, knowingseems to require the ability to track the truth about the world, sothat when the world changes, my cognitive attitude about the worldchanges with it. But this ability to be responsive to changingconditions is not obviously anything exotic, and it does seem toentail that the object of the mind is not a proposition (that thetraffic light is red seems like a paradigm example of aproposition, after all).
Finally, psychologists themselves have increasingly focused oncharacterizing the cognitive profile of understanding. Thus TaniaLombrozo and colleagues have explored the question of why we seekunderstanding, and how activities such as offering explanations aid inthe acquisition and retention of understanding (Lombrozo, 2012;Williams & Lombrozo, 2010, 2013; Lombrozo & Wilkenfeld 2019).Psychologists have also explored the empirical question of how good(or bad) we are at identifying real relationships and dependencies inthe world. According to Frank Keil, for example, we are not good atthis at all, and we frequently fall prey to illusions of understanding(Keil 2006; cf. Ylikoski 2009). For instance, we often think weunderstand how a helicopter achieves lift, or how moving thepedals on a bicycle help to propel the bike forward. But in bothcases, we are often well wide of the mark (Keil 2006; cf. Grimm 2009;Sloman & Fernbach 2017).
Suppose you accurately grasp that your house burned down because offaulty wiring. You do not think it burned down because of a lightningstrike, or a stray cigarette. Faulty wiring was the cause, and youaccurately grasp it as the cause (see Pritchard 2009, 2010 for moredetails on a case like this).
While some argue that the normative profile of understanding isessentially the same as the normative profile of knowledge (Grimm2006; Khalifa 2013, 2017b; Greco 2014), others claim that they differin important ways, and especially with respect to the way in whichunderstanding, but not knowledge, seems compatible with luck.Among theorists who see a difference between knowledge andunderstanding here, we can distinguish those who claim thatunderstanding can be fully externally lucky from those whothink it can only be partly externally lucky.
What is distinctive about understanding has to do with the way inwhich an individual combines pieces of information into a unifiedbody. This point is not meant to imply that truth is not important forunderstanding, for we have noted already the factive character of bothknowledge and understanding. But once we move past its facticity, thegrasping of relations between items of information is central to thenature of understanding. By contrast, when we move past the facticityof knowledge, the central features involve non-accidental connectionsbetween mind and world. (Kvanvig 2003: 197)
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