Goldman, A. Defends a lack of control account of luck. Just as we draw a distinction between this epistemic state (that is, intelligibility, or what Grimm calls subjective understanding) and understanding (which has a much stricter factivity requirement), it makes sense to draw a line between grasping* and grasping where one is factive and the other is not. As Wilkenfeld sees it, understanding should be construed as representational manipulability, which is to say that understanding is, essentially, the possessing of some representation that can be manipulated in useful ways.
The Epistemology Shift, Essay Example That is, we often describe an individual as having a better understanding of a subject matter than some other person, perhaps when choosing whom to approach for advice or when looking for someone to teach us about a subject. According to his positive proposal, objectual understanding is the goal and what typically sates the appetite associated with curiosity. By contrast, the paradigmatic case of environmental epistemic luck is the famous barn faade case (for example, Ginet 1975; Goldman 1979), a case where what an agent looks at is a genuine barn which unbeknownst to the individual is surrounded by faades which are indistinguishable to the agent from the genuine barn. In other words, they claim that one cannot always tell that one understands. The Value of Understanding In D. Pritchard, A. Haddock and A. Millar (eds. In short, then, Kvanvig wants to insist that the true beliefs that one attains in acquiring ones understanding can all be Gettiered, even though the Gettier-style luck which prevents these beliefs from qualifying as knowledge does not undermine the understanding this individual acquires. Elgin, C. Z. In particular, as Pritchard suggests, we might want to consider that agents working with the ideal gas law or other idealizations do not necessarily have false beliefs as a result, even if the content of the proposition expressed by the law is not strictly true. Kvanvig does not spell out what grasping might involve, in the sense now under consideration, in his discussion of coherence, and the other remarks we considered above. The Problem of the External World 2.
Philosophers concern on epistemological shift - Eddusaver A restatement of Grimms view might accordingly be: understanding is knowledge of dependence relations. Intervening epistemic luck is the sort present in the Gettiers original cases (1963) which convinced most epistemologists to abandon the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief. The thought is that, in cases of achievement, the relevant success must be primarily creditable to the exercise of the agents abilities, rather than to some other factor (for example, luck). Should we say that the use of the term understanding that applies to such cases should be of no interest to epistemology? These retractions do not t seem to make sense on the weak view. This is perhaps partially because there is a tendency to hold a persons potential understanding to standards of objective appropriateness as well as subjective appropriateness. We regularly claim that people can understand everything from theories to pieces of technology, accounts of historical events and the psychology of other individuals. For that reason, these will be addressed before moving on to the more explicitly epistemological concerns. What is Justified Belief? In G. S. Pappas (ed. ), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. For example, by trusting someone I should not have trusted, or even worse, by reading tea leaves which happened to afford me true beliefs about chemistry. 824 Words. However, Pritchards work on epistemic luck (for example, 2005) and how it is incompatible with knowledge leads him to reason that understanding is immune to some but not all forms of malignant luck (that is, luck which is incompatible with knowledge). Contrast thiscall it the intervening reading of the casewith Pritchards corresponding environmental reading of the case, where we are to imagine that the agent is reading a reliable academic book which is the source of many true beliefs she acquires about the Comanche. Khalifas (2013) view of understanding is a form of explanatory idealism. A more sophisticated understanding has it that human beings and the other great apes descended from a common hominid ancestor (who was not, strictly speaking, an ape). One point that could potentially invite criticism is the move from (1) and (2) to (3). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Grimm (2012) has wondered whether this view might get things explanatorily backwards. Pritchards verdict is that we should deny understanding in the intervening case and attribute it in the environmental case. Regarding factivity, then, it seems there is room for a view that occupies the middle ground here. However, it is not entirely clear that extant views on understanding fall so squarely into these two camps. Make sure you cite them appropriately within your paper, and list them in APA format on your Reference page. In the first version, we are to imagine that the agent gets her beliefs from a faux-academic book filled with mere rumors that turn out to be luckily true. Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology. Ethics 120 (2009): 94-127. Argues that we should replace the main developed accounts of understanding with earlier accounts of scientific explanation. While Khalifa favors earlier accounts of scientific understanding to the more recent views that have been submitted by epistemologists, he is aware that some criticisms (for example, Lipton (2009) and Pritchard (2010)) to the effect that requiring knowledge of an explanation is too strong a necessary condition on understanding-why.
epistemological shift pros and cons - hashootrust.org.pk Greco, J. Dordecht: Springer, 2014. Rohwer argues that counterexamples like Pritchards intervening luck cases only appear plausible because the beliefs that make up the agents understanding come exclusively from a bad source. For example, we might suppose that a system of beliefs contains only beliefs about a particular subject matter, and that these beliefs will ordinarily be sufficient for a rational believer who possesses them to answer questions about that subject matter reliably. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. That said, Hills adds some qualifications. Kvanvig identifies the main opponent to his view, that the scope of curiosity is enough to support the unrestricted value of understanding, to be one on which knowledge is what is fundamental to curiosity. 1. Is it a kind of knowledge, another kind of propositional attitude, an ability, and so forth? Nevertheless, considering weakly factive construals of objective understanding draws attention to an important pointthat there are also interesting epistemic states in the neighborhood of understanding. When considering interesting features that might set understanding apart from propositional knowledge, the idea of grasping something is often mentioned. One natural place to start will be to examine the relationship between understanding and epistemic luck. For one thing, she admits that these abilities can be possessed by degrees. Rationalism is an epistemological theory, so rationalism can be interpreted the distinct aspects or parts of the mind that are separate senses. ), Knowledge, Virtue and Action. Keplers theory is a further advance in understanding, and the current theory is yet a further advance. ), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (2nd Edition). Positivism follows an identical approach as the study of natural sciences in the testing of a theory.
Digital Culture and Shifting Epistemology - hybridpedagogy.org Pritchard, D. Knowledge, Understanding and Epistemic Value In A. OHear (ed. According to Elgin, a factive conception of understanding neither reflects our practices in ascribing understanding nor does justice to contemporary science. Perhaps, as Harvey (2006b) suggests, we do need to reconfigure academic protocols in order to make more room for these kinds of . Janvid, M. Knowledge versus Understanding: The Cost of Avoiding Gettier. Acta Analytica 27 (2012): 183-197. Argues that requiring knowledge of an explanation is too strong a condition on understanding-why. Assume that the surgeon is suffering from the onset of some degenerative mental disease and the first symptom is his forgetting which blood vessel he should be using to bypass the narrowed section of the coronary artery. Baker, L. R. Third Person Understanding in A. Sanford (ed. However, Baker (2003) has offered an account on which at least some instances of understanding-why are non-factive. Uses the hypothesis of extended cognition to argue that understanding can be located (at least partly) outside the head. To the extent that this is right, Zagzebski is endorsing a kind of KU principle (compare: KK). Early defence of explanations key role in understanding. For example, we might suppose an agent has a maximally complete explanation of how Michelangelos David came into existence between 1501 and 1504, what methods were used to craft it, what Michelangelos motivating reasons were at the time, how much clay was used, and so on. This is a change from the past. epistemological shift pros and cons. Given that the result is the same (that is, the patients heart muscle blood supply is improved) regardless of whether he successfully completes the operation by luck or by skill, the instrumental value of the action is the same.
The Pros And Cons Of Epistemology - Internet Public Library Discusses whether intellectualist arguments for reducing know-how to propositional knowledge might also apply to understanding-why (if it is a type of knowing how). The possession of such judgment plausibly lines up more closely with ability possession (that is, (i)-(vi)) than with propositional attitude possession. The childs opinion displays some grasp of evolution. as in testimony cases in friendly environments, where knowledge acquisition demands very little on the part of the agent), he argues that cognitive achievement is not essentially wedded to knowledge (as robust virtue epistemologists would hold). With a wide range of subtly different accounts of understanding (both objectual and understanding-why) on the table, it will be helpful to consider how understanding interfaces with certain key debates in epistemology. This is a change from the past. A monograph that explores the nature and value of achievements in great depth. Her main supporting example is of understanding the rate at which objects in a vacuum fall toward the earth (that is, 32 feet per second), a belief that ignores the gravitational attraction of everything except the earth and so is therefore not true. To what extent do the advantages and disadvantages of, for example, sensitive invariantist, contextualist, insensitive invariantist and relativist approaches to knowledge attributions find parallels in the case of understanding attributions. 57-74, 2015. Therefore, the need to adopt a weak factivity constraint on objectual understandingat least on the basis of cases that feature idealizationslooks at least initially to be unmotivated in the absence of a more sophisticated view about the relationship between factivity, belief and acceptance (however, see Elgin 2004). Your paper should be 3-4 pages in length, not counting the Title page and Reference page. If so, why, and if not why not? Section 5 considers questions about what might explain the value of understanding; for example, various epistemologists have made suggestions focusing on transparency, distinctive types of achievement and curiosity, while others have challenged the assumption that understanding is of special value. True enough. Philosophical issues, 14(1) (2004): 113-131. Resists the alleged similarity between understanding and knowing-how. This skeptical argument is worth engaging with, presumably with the goal of showing that understanding does not turn out to be internally indistinguishable from mere intelligibility. This section considers the connection between understanding-why and truth, and then engages with the more complex issue of whether objectual understanding is factive. For example, and problematically for any account of objectual understanding that relaxes a factivity constraint, people frequently retract previous attributions of understanding. It is controversial just which epistemological issues concerning understanding should be central or primarygiven that understanding is a relative newcomer in the mainstream epistemological literature. Kim, J. Put generally, according to the coherentist family of proposals of the structure of justified belief, a belief or set of beliefs is justified, or justifiably held, just in case the belief coheres with a set of beliefs, the set forms a coherent system, or some variation on these themes (Olsson 2012: 1). In other words, S knows that p only if p is true. Knowledge is almost universally taken to be to be factive (compare, Hazlett 2010). In practice, individuals' epistemological beliefs determine how they think knowledge or truth can be comprehended, what problems - if any - are associated with various views of pursuing and presenting knowledge and what role researchers play in its discovery (Robson, 2002). Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon. But when the object of understanding why is essentially evaluativefor example, understanding why the statue is beautifulit seems that the quality of ones understanding could vary dramatically even when we hold fixed that one possesses a correct and complete explanation of how the statue came to be (that is, both a physical and social description of these causes). Description Recall that epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Hetherington, S. There Can be Lucky Knowledge in M. Steup, J. Turri and E. Sosa (eds. To defend the claim that possessing the kinds of abilities Hills draws attention to is not a matter of simply having extra items of knowledgeshe notes that one could have the extra items of knowledge and still lack the good judgment that allows you to form new, related true beliefs. According to Goldman (1991) curiosity is a desire for true belief; by contrast, Williamson views curiosity as a desire for knowledge. Such a constraint would preserve the intuition that understanding is a particularly desirable epistemic good and would accordingly be untroubled by the issues highlighted for the weakest view outlined at the start of the section. Putting this all together, a scientist who embraces the ideal gas law, as an idealization, would not necessarily have any relevant false beliefs.