## 1. Contexts



The concept of understanding has been sometimes prominent, sometimes
neglected, and sometimes viewed with suspicion, across a number of
different areas of philosophy (for a partial overview, see Zagzebski
2001). This section traces some of that background, beginning with the
place of understanding in Ancient Greek philosophy. It then considers
how the topic of understanding was lost and then
"recovered" in contemporary discussions in epistemology
and the philosophy of science.


### 1.1 Ancient Philosophy



The ancient Greek word *episteme* is at the root of our
contemporary word "epistemology", and among philosophers
it has been common to translate *episteme* simply as
"knowledge" (see, e.g., Parry 2003 [2020]).



For the last several decades, however, a case has been made that
"understanding" is a better translation of
*episteme*. (For early influential arguments see, e.g.,
Moravscik 1979; Burnyeat 1980, 1981; Annas 1981.) To appreciate why,
note that knowledge, as now commonly conceived, can apparently be
quite easy to get. Thus it seems I can know a proposition such as
*that it is raining outside* just by opening my eyes. It also
seems that items of knowledge can be in principle isolated or
atomistic. I can therefore apparently know that it is raining while
knowing very little about other things, such as why it is raining, or
what constitutes rain, or when it will stop.



Understanding seems to be different than knowledge in both respects.
For one thing, understanding typically seems harder to acquire, and
more of an epistemic accomplishment, than knowledge (Pritchard 2010).
For another, the objects of understanding seem more structured and
interconnected (Zagzebski 2019). Thus the subject matters we try to
understand are often highly complex (quantum mechanics, the U.S. Civil
War), and even when we try to understand isolated events (such as the
spilling of my coffee cup), we typically do so by drawing connections
with other events (such as the jostling of the table by my knee).



With contrasts such as these in mind, it has seemed to several
scholars of Ancient philosophy that *episteme* has more in
common with what we would now call "understanding" than
what we would now call "knowledge". Thus Julia Annas notes
that, for Plato, the person with *episteme* has a
*systematic* understanding of things, and is not a mere
possessor of various truths (Annas 1981: ch. 10). Jonathan Lear
similarly claims that for Aristotle,



> 
> 
> To have *episteme* one must not only know a thing, one must
> also grasp its cause or explanation. This is to understand it: to know
> in a deep sense what it is and how it has come to be. (Lear 1988:
> 6)
> 
> 
> 



Granted, what Greek philosophers had in mind by *episteme*
often does not fully align with our contemporary ideas about
understanding, because in the hands of philosophers such as Plato and
Aristotle *episteme* is an exceptionally high-grade epistemic
accomplishment. For Plato, full *episteme* seems to require a
grasp of the basic elements of reality--in its most complete
form, a grasp that traces back to the Form of the Good itself (Schwab
2016, 2020; Moss 2020). For Aristotle, it seems to require an
appreciation of the deductive relationships that allegedly hold
between natures or first principles and observable phenomena (Burnyeat
1981). In our contemporary use, by contrast, we often happily ascribe
understanding to quite low-grade cases, where forms or first
principles do not seem to be grasped or even relevant--as when we
take ourselves to understand why the coffee cup spilled. Still, with
its stress on systematicity and interconnectedness, *episteme*
plausibly has more in common with our contemporary concept
*understanding* than our contemporary concept
*knowledge*.



If an understanding-like state was of fundamental epistemic importance
to the Greeks, it is interesting to ask why the focus of epistemology
shifted over time, and why an interest in knowledge, especially
propositional knowledge, came to predominate--including and maybe
especially quite isolated bits of propositional knowledge, such as
*that I am sitting in front of a fire*, or *that I have two
hands*.



Perhaps the shift occurred in response to the rise of scepticism in
Hellenistic philosophy (Burnyeat 1980: 188; cf. Zagzebski 2001: 236).
Or perhaps the modern focus on propositional knowledge was a response
to the wars of religion in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe,
where it became increasingly important to distinguish good knowledge
claims from bad, even with respect to quite isolated claims. (For more
on the modern rise of interest in propositional knowledge, see Pasnau
2010; 2017.) Regardless of why the shift occurred, a desire to grasp
"how things hang together" undoubtedly remained a part of
the human condition. It is therefore unsurprising that a move to
revive understanding as a topic of philosophical inquiry eventually
emerged.


### 1.2 Epistemology & Philosophy of Science



Although understanding as an epistemic good was largely neglected by
modern epistemologists in favor of theorizing about knowledge (or
related epistemic properties, such as justification and rationality),
it reappeared as a central object of concern at the end of the
twentieth century, for a few different reasons.



Catherine Elgin, for one, influentially argued that we cannot make
sense of some of our greatest intellectual accomplishments, especially
the accomplishments we associate with science and art, without
appreciating the way they are often oriented not towards knowledge,
but rather understanding (see especially Elgin 1991, 1996). From the
perspective of virtue epistemology, Linda Zagzebski claimed that if we
think of an intellectual virtue as an "excellence of the
mind", attuned to a variety of epistemic goods, then there is
something one-sided about focusing attention only on the good of
knowledge, while neglecting other highly prized goods such as
understanding and wisdom (see especially Zagzebski 1996: 43-50;
2001). Finally, Jonathan Kvanvig forcefully argued that while
understanding is distinctively valuable from an epistemic point of
view--i.e., more valuable than any of its proper parts, such as
truth, or justification, or a combination of the two--knowledge
is not (Kvanvig 2003). For all these thinkers, the spotlight of
concern within epistemology needed to be broadened so that goods such
as understanding could be given their proper due, and their claims
resonated with other epistemologists (for overviews, see Gordon 2017;
Hannon *forthcoming*).



While the notion of understanding was often simply neglected in
epistemology, in the philosophy of science it was for many years
actively downplayed. A primary figure in this dynamic was Carl Hempel
(see especially Hempel 1965). Although Hempel helped bring the notion
of explanation back into respectability in the philosophy of science,
he had significant reservations about tying explanation too closely to
the notion of understanding.



Part of this seemed to stem from the fact that the idea of
understanding that prevailed in his day was highly subjective and
psychological--it emphasized more a subjective
"sense" of understanding, often tied to a felt sense of
familiarity. As Hempel notes, however, poor explanations might excel
along this dimension because they might



> 
> 
> give the questioner a sense of having attained some understanding;
> they may resolve his perplexity and in this sense "answer"
> his question.
> 
> 
> 



"But", he continues,



> 
> 
> however satisfactory these answers may be psychologically, they are
> not adequate for the purposes of science, which, after all, is
> concerned to develop a conception of the world that has a clear,
> logical bearing on our experience and is thus capable of objective
> test. (Hempel 1966: 47-48)
> 
> 
> 



The goodness of an explanation therefore seems to have little obvious
connection to whether it manages to generate understanding in a
particular audience. A good explanation might do that. But then again,
it might not. Patently poor explanations are also able to generate a
rich "sense" of understanding in some audiences (think of
conspiracy theorists), despite their shortcomings.



Philosophers such as Michael Friedman responded to Hempel's
concerns by noting that simply because there seems to be a
psychological element to understanding it does not follow that
understanding is merely subjective or up for grabs (Friedman 1974).
After all, knowledge has a psychological element, in light of the
belief condition, but few hold that knowledge is merely subjective or
up for grabs. Others, such as Jaegwon Kim, argued that leaving
considerations about understanding out of accounts of explanation was
deeply mistaken (Kim 1994 [2010]). After all, Kim claimed, we desire
to explain things *because* we want to understand them.



Despite the efforts of Friedman, Kim, and others, significant
reservations about the notion of understanding continued to linger in
the philosophy of science (see, for example, Trout 2002). A notable
shift occurred with Henk de Regt's distinction between the
"feeling" or phenomenology of understanding and genuine
understanding (de Regt 2004, 2009: ch. 1; cf. de Regt and Dieks 2005).
In particular, he argued that the feeling is neither necessary nor
sufficient for genuine understanding. De Regt's important
distinction helped pave the way for a new surge of work on the topic
over the last two decades, and helped philosophers move beyond
thinking of understanding mainly in terms of felt
"*aha!*" or "*eureka!*"
experiences.


## 2. Theoretical Frameworks



As we look to particular accounts of understanding, it will help to
consider in turn:


1. understanding's distinctive object (or objects),
2. its distinctive psychology, and
3. the distinctive sort of normative relationship that needs to hold
between the psychology of the person who understands and the object of
his or her understanding.



By way of comparison, consider the traditional "justified true
belief" analysis of knowledge. On this view, knowledge involves
a distinctive object (roughly, the truth, or a true proposition), a
distinctive psychology (the psychological act of belief or assent),
and a distinctive normative relationship that needs to hold between
the psychology of the believer and the thing believed (namely, that
one's belief in the true proposition needs to be justified, in
some sense).



What can be said, in a parallel way, about the elements of
understanding?


### 2.1 Objects of Understanding



At least at first glance, the objects of understanding appear to be so
varied 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. Elgin
1996: 123).



In line with the discussion in Ancient philosophy, and setting aside
for the moment special issues related to understanding other people
(see Section 5), let us start with the generic view that the objects
of understanding are something like "connections" or
"relations". Following a distinction from Kim (1994
[2010]), we can contrast two ways of thinking about these connections
and relations--i.e., these plausible objects of
understanding.



According to *explanatory internalism*, the connections or
explanatory relations one grasps are "logico-linguistic"
relations that hold among a person's beliefs or attitudes, or
more exactly the contents of those beliefs or attitudes (Kim 1994
[2010]). *What* we grasp or see, when we understand some
phenomenon, are how these various contents are logically or
semantically related to one another.



Kim argues that Hempel is a paradigm example of an explanatory
internalist (Kim 1994 [2010]; cf. 1999 [2010]). For instance, suppose
that one wants to explain and hence understand why a particular bar of
metal began to rust (McCain 2016: ch. 9). A good Hempelian explanation
would be one in which a sentence describing the rusting follows
inferentially from (a) a statement of the initial conditions (the
moisture in the air, the constitution of the bar) and (b) a further
law-like statement connecting the moisture, the constitution of the
bar, and the onset of rust.



This Hempelian framework seems internalist because what you see or
grasp, when you understand the phenomenon, are connections among the
propositions you accept--more exactly, you see or grasp different
inferential or probabilistic connections among the contents of your
beliefs that bear on the rusting. As Kim puts it:



> 
> 
> the basic relation that generates an explanatory relation is a
> logico-linguistic one that connects descriptions of events, and the
> job of formulating an explanation consists, it seems, in merely
> re-arranging appropriate items in the body of propositions that
> constitute our total knowledge at a time. In explaining something,
> then, all action takes place *within* the epistemic system, on
> the subjective side of the divide between knowledge and the reality
> known, or between representation and the world represented. (Kim 1994
> [2010: 171-172])
> 
> 
> 



An *explanatory externalist* by comparison holds that the basic
connections or relationship one grasps, when one understands, are not
logico-linguistic but metaphysical. What you grasp, when you
understand why the metal began to rust, are not primarily
relationships among your beliefs or their contents. Rather, you
primarily grasp real, mind-independent relationships that obtain in
the world.



Theorists who hold that the objects of understanding are
internal--i.e., logico-linguistic relations, the grasp of which
yields understanding--vary somewhat about which relations count.
Although it seems clear in Hempel that the objects are inferential
relationships of deductive and inductive support, epistemologists
often appeal in a general way to relations of *coherence*. Thus
Carter and Gordon write:



> 
> 
> We think it is clear that *objectual understanding*--for
> example, as one attains when one grasps the relevant coherence-making
> relations between propositions comprising some subject matter--is
> a particularly valuable epistemic good... Understanding wider
> subject matters will tend to be more cognitively demanding than
> understanding narrow subject matters because *more*
> propositions must be believed and their relations grasped. (Carter
> & Gordon 2014: 7-8)
> 
> 
> 



Kvanvig likewise points to the importance of coherence:



> 
> 
> Central to the notion of understanding are various coherence-like
> elements: to have understanding is to grasp explanatory and conceptual
> connections between various pieces of information involved in the
> subject matter in question. Such language involves a subjective
> element (the grasping or seeing of the connections in question) and a
> more objective, epistemic element. The more objective, epistemic
> element is precisely the kind of element identified by coherentists as
> central to the notion of epistemic justification or rationality, as
> clarified, in particular, by Lehrer (1974), BonJour (1985) and Lycan
> (1988). (Kvanvig 2018: 699)
> 
> 
> 



Other epistemologists similarly point to coherence relations as the
objects of understanding (e.g., Riggs 2003: 192). Since
"coherence" is presumably a relation that holds among the
contents of beliefs, and not among items out there in the world, these
views would qualify as internalist accounts of the objects of
understanding, according to the Kimean framework. (For further
examples and criticism, see Khalifa 2017a.)



For externalists about the object of understanding, especially
concerning phenomena "out there in the world", the
proposed objects vary. For instance, there is some support for the
idea that the objects are *nomic relations*, or relationships
according to which individual events and other phenomena are explained
by laws, and upper-level laws are explained by lower-level or more
fundamental laws (Railton 1978). Another view is that the objects are
*causal relations* (Salmon 1984; Lipton 1991 [2004]), or more
generally *dependence relations* (Kim 1974, 1994; Grimm 2014,
2017; Greco 2014; Dellsen 2020), where causation is usually
taken to be just one species of dependence.



A variation on the "dependence relationships" idea is that
the objects of understanding are "possibility spaces" (cf.
le Bihan 2017). Indeed, on the plausible assumption that dependence is
an essentially modal notion--that is, fundamentally tied to ideas
of possibility and necessity--dependence relations ineliminably
give rise to or generate possibility spaces. This is in keeping with a
suggestion by Robert Nozick that



> 
> 
> explanation locates something in actuality, showing its actual
> connections with other things, while *understanding* locates it
> in a network of possibility, showing the connections it would have to
> other nonactual things or processes. (Nozick 1981: 12; cf. Grimm
> 2008)
> 
> 
> 



Note that the distinction between internal and external explanation
relations is related to, but cross-cuts, another influential
distinction by Wesley Salmon, between ontic and epistemic accounts of
explanation (Salmon 1989; for discussion see Bechtel & Abrahamsen
2005 and Craver 2014). Salmon's distinction has come in for
criticism (see, e.g., Illari 2013; Bokulich 2016, 2018), because among
other things it is not clear why epistemic accounts should not be
ontic or world-involving; knowledge is an epistemic concept, after
all, but it is ontic or world-involving in virtue of the truth
condition. The distinction between explanatory internalism and
externalism plausibly avoids this concern.



Suppose in any case that the objects of understanding--the
connections or relations we grasp when we understand--are out
there in the world, and are not simply logico-linguistic items or
elements of our psychology. According to a further important
distinction from John Greco (2014), it does not follow that these
logico-linguistic/psychological items--or more generally these
*mental representations*--do not play a crucial role in
our coming to understand, because the representations typically play
the role of *vehicles* of understanding, even if they are not
themselves understanding's object. More generally, Greco notes,
it is important to distinguish between the *object of
understanding* vs. the *vehicle of understanding*, i.e.,
"between the *thing* understood and its
*representation*" (Greco 2014: 293).



Thus consider that a good map--say, of Midtown Manhattan--is
typically a vehicle of understanding rather than an object of
understanding. When it is accurate, it allows the mind to grasp how
the streets and landmarks of Midtown are laid out, and to appreciate
the relationships they bear to one another. Or again, typically when
you take a look at your car's gas gauge and form the belief that
the tank is half empty, the gauge is the *vehicle* by which you
form your belief about the gas, but it is not the *object* of
your belief (see Dretske 1981). Assuming that the gauge is functioning
properly, the object of your belief is the gas itself, while the gauge
is simply the vehicle that represents the state of the gas to you.



(Of course, either the map or the gauge could *become* an
object of understanding--one could think about how the streets
and landmarks are represented, e.g., the different colors or shapes or
fonts the map uses to represent Midtown, or the length of the
gauge--but this would be to "involve a representation of a
representation" (Greco 2014: 293). And while the mind is capable
of such an act, it represents an element of abstraction, and plausibly
a departure from our usual way of engaging with the world.)



This distinction between objects and vehicles of understanding leaves
open the possibility that mental representations might not be the only
vehicles of understanding, or the only way of latching on to real
relations in the world. Perhaps a person might come to understand the
world by first manually manipulating it, thus noting the possibilities
that it affords and how its different elements are connected (cf.
Lipton 2009; Kuorikoski and Ylikoski 2015). This would be a way to
"directly" grasp causal structure, a structure that could
then--cognitively downstream, as it were--be represented by
the mind, perhaps in the form of mental maps, or "dependence
maps" (see Section 2.2).



Appreciating the contrast between vehicle of understanding and object
of understanding helps to reveal that in addition to pure internalist
views about the object of understanding (where the objects of
understanding are logico-linguistic relations), and pure externalist
views (where the objects are worldly), there are also possible hybrid
views.



For instance, on the sort of view we find in Michael Strevens's
*Depth* (2008), what we grasp in the first instance are
relations that hold among the contents of our beliefs: relations of
deductive entailment or coherence or probabilistic support. This view
is not simply internalist, however, because grasping these
logico-linguistic relationships, and in particular the relationships
of deductive entailment, "mirror" the real relationships
that obtain in the world, and thus provide a vehicle for apprehending
those relationships (Strevens 2008: 72). Thus Strevens holds that his
theory is able to:



> 
> 
> show how a deductive argument, or similar formal structure, can
> represent causal influence.... When a deductive argument is of
> the right sort to represent a causal process that has as a consequence
> the state of affairs asserted to hold by the argument's
> conclusion, I say that the argument *causally entails* the
> conclusion. A derivation that causally entails its conclusion, then,
> is one that can be used to represent (whether truly or not) a causal
> process that has the concluding state of affairs as its consequence.
> (Strevens 2012: 449)
> 
> 
> 



On this view, by grasping or appreciating the necessitating force of
an entailment relation one thereby grasps or appreciates the
necessitating force of a causal relation--or, at least, something
importantly like it.



According to another hybrid approach, the internal logical or
probabilistic relationships do not *mirror* the relationships
out there in the world, but rather *provide evidence* for the
existence of relationships out there in the world. Thus some hold that
when things go well an appreciation or grasp of the probabilistic
connections among the various things we believe allows us to infer the
existence of real causal connections in the world (see**S**pirtes, Glymour, & Scheines 1993; Pearl 2000 [2009]). As
Wesley Salmon characterizes an earlier version of this idea,



> 
> 
> The explanatory significance of statistical relations is indirect.
> Their fundamental import lies in the fact... that they constitute
> evidence for causal relations. (Salmon 1984: 192)
> 
> 
> 



Bearing in mind earlier distinctions, these would be accounts on which
one's appreciation of statistical relations is the vehicle
through which one grasps real (external) causal relations in the
world.


### 2.2 Psychology of Understanding



With respect to the psychology of understanding, recall that the
psychological element of propositional knowledge is typically
construed in terms of *belief*, where belief is taken to be a
kind of assent or saying "Yes" to the content of the
proposition. Thus to believe that the sky is blue is to assent to the
proposition *that the sky is blue*; it is "taking it to
be true" *that the sky is blue*.



When we turn to understanding, by contrast, some have claimed that a
new suite of cognitive abilities comes onto the scene, abilities that
we did not find in ordinary cases of propositional knowledge. In
particular, some philosophers claim that the kind of mental action
verbs that naturally come to the fore when we think about
understanding--"grasping" and "seeing",
for example--evoke mental abilities "beyond belief",
i.e., beyond simple assent or taking-to-be-true (for an overview, see
Baumberger, Beisbart, & Brun 2017).



For instance, Elgin, de Regt, and Wilkenfeld argue that those who
grasp how things are connected are able to cognitively
"do" things that others cannot--they can apply their
understanding to new cases, for example, and draw new inferences.
(See, for example, Elgin 1996: 122-24; de Regt 2004, 2017;
Wilkenfeld 2013). Thus car mechanics who understand how engines work
are able to make sense of engines that they have not encountered
before, and to anticipate how changes in one part of the engine will
typically lead (or fail to lead) to changes in other parts.



Grimm claims that the distinctive nature of these abilities flows from
the distinctive nature of the objects of understanding (Grimm 2017).
Suppose that the connections or relations one grasps are complex
enough to constitute what we might call
"structures"--structures with parts that depend upon
one another in various ways. Arguably, for the mind to take up these
structures in the right way, it is not enough simply to assent to
their existence. Rather, one needs to appreciate how the structure
"works", or how changes in its various parts will lead, or
fail to lead, to changes in other parts.



For instance, suppose the structures to be grasped are represented by
"causal maps" or "dependence maps"--maps
with nodes representing variables that can take on different values
and thus represent directions of dependence (Gopnik & Glymour
2002; Gopnik et al. 2004). In the schematic image below, from Gopnik
et al. (2004), the map represents a system in which changes to the
value of *Z* bring about changes to the value of *S*,
changes to the value of *S* bring about changes to the values of
*X* and *R*, and so on.



![6 nodes: Z, S, R, X, W, and Y. Z is above S, R is below S, X is to the right of S, W is to the right of X, Y is below X. Arrows go from Z to S, S to R, S to X, X to W, Y to X and Y to S](figure1.svg)


According to Grimm (2017), a striking feature of these maps is that
they are, as it were, "mobile" maps. That is, they are
cognitive representations that by their very nature can adapt and
change as the variables represented by the map take on different
values. Put another way, they are "unsaturated" maps, in
the sense that they are characterized in terms of unsaturated
variables that can *become* saturated by taking on different
values. What this means in terms of cognitive uptake is important,
Grimm argues, because if the maps are mobile or unsaturated in this
way, then the mind that aptly takes them up must itself be mobile. In
particular, the mind that takes up causal maps in a way that yields
understanding must be able to anticipate how varying or adjusting the
value of one of the variables will lead (or fail to lead) to changes
in the values of the other variables (cf. Woodward 2003).



Relatedly, Alison Hills characterizes the distinctive psychological
abilities that undergird understanding in terms of "cognitive
control" (Hills 2016). For example, Hills claims that in order
to understand why it is right to give money to charity, it is not
enough to simply believe the proposition *that it is right to give
money to charity because we owe assistance to the very needy*
(Hills 2016: 669), because I could accept a "because"
claim along these lines on the basis of testimony while having only a
very dim sense of how the two ingredient claims (that it is right to
give money and we owe assistance to the very needy) are related. What
is needed in addition is an appreciation of the relationship between
these two claims. And what this involves, according to the cognitive
control view, is an ability to "manipulate" the things
standing in relationship: for example, to be able to make a variety of
inferences in light of the relationship (Hills 2016: 663).



Although the views we have considered so far agree in thinking that
there is "something special" from a psychological point of
view about understanding, other accounts claim that there is nothing
particularly special about understanding's psychological
profile. More exactly, it is said that understanding does not appeal
to any special abilities or capacities that we do not find in ordinary
cases of knowledge.



Emily Sullivan, for instance, claims that even if we grant that
understanding involves abilities, it does not follow that there is
something special about understanding from a psychological point of
view, because ordinary propositional knowledge itself requires
abilities (Sullivan 2018). Thus I can apparently only know that the
traffic light is red, in the actual world, if I would have gotten the
color right in close possible worlds as well. More generally, knowing
seems to require the ability to track the truth about the world, so
that when the world changes, my cognitive attitude about the world
changes with it. But this ability to be responsive to changing
conditions is not obviously anything exotic, and it does seem to
entail that the object of the mind is not a proposition (*that the
traffic light is red* seems like a paradigm example of a
proposition, after all).



Along the same lines, Kareem Khalifa claims that abilities are
involved in understanding, but holds that they are "especially
unspecial" (Khalifa 2017b: 56). For Khalifa, the modal character
of abilities is evident in normal scientific practice, because as
scientists evaluate explanations on the basis of testing they
naturally rule out inadequate explanations and gravitate towards
well-supported ones. But evaluating and testing hypotheses in this way
does not appear to require anything exotic or special from a
psychological point of view, or to entail that the object of
understanding is not propositional.



Finally, psychologists themselves have increasingly focused on
characterizing the cognitive profile of understanding. Thus Tania
Lombrozo and colleagues have explored the question of why we seek
understanding, and how activities such as offering explanations aid in
the 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 in
the world. According to Frank Keil, for example, we are not good at
this at all, and we frequently fall prey to illusions of understanding
(Keil 2006; cf. Ylikoski 2009). For instance, we often think we
understand how a helicopter achieves lift, or how moving the
pedals on a bicycle help to propel the bike forward.  But in both
cases, we are often well wide of the mark (Keil 2006; cf. Grimm 2009;
Sloman & Fernbach 2017).


### 2.3 Normativity of Understanding



Suppose you accurately grasp that your house burned down because of
faulty wiring. You do not think it burned down because of a lightning
strike, or a stray cigarette. Faulty wiring was the cause, and you
accurately grasp it as the cause (see Pritchard 2009, 2010 for more
details on a case like this).



Is that all there is to understanding why your house burned down? Or
does it also matter, for example, *how one comes to grasp* this
relationship? These questions push us to ask about the normative
dimension of understanding, and in particular to ask: Are there better
and worse ways to come by one's grasp, and does this matter for
the acquisition of understanding? For example, are careful experiments
or good evidence needed? Or can one come by one's grasp more or
less by luck, and yet still in a way that generates understanding?



A parallel question with respect to knowledge would ask: Supposing you
have a true belief, is that all there is to knowledge? And here most
would say "no". In addition to the true belief, *how
you came by* *that true belief* is also important. Is it
based on good evidence, or a reliable process, or a well-functioning
design plan? When it comes to knowledge, these further normative
questions clearly matter. It is therefore not surprising that the same
sorts of questions have been asked with respect to understanding.



While some argue that the normative profile of understanding is
essentially the same as the normative profile of knowledge (Grimm
2006; Khalifa 2013, 2017b; Greco 2014), others claim that they differ
in important ways, and especially with respect to the way in which
understanding, but not knowledge, seems compatible with *luck*.
Among theorists who see a difference between knowledge and
understanding here, we can distinguish those who claim that
understanding can be *fully externally lucky* from those who
think it can only be *partly externally lucky*.



A leading advocate of the *fully externally lucky* view is
Jonathan Kvanvig, who argues that how one comes by one's
accurate grasp matters--what we might call the
"etiology" of the accurate grasp--but it does not
matter in all the same ways that we find in cases of knowledge (see
especially Kvanvig 2003). In particular, it matters that the grasp was
acquired in a way that was *internally appropriate*
(especially, in accord with the evidence in one's possession),
but it does not matter that the grasp was *externally
appropriate*--for example, that one came by one's
evidence in a reliable way. Thus Kvanvig argues:



> 
> 
> What is distinctive about understanding has to do with the way in
> which an individual combines pieces of information into a unified
> body. This point is not meant to imply that truth is not important for
> understanding, for we have noted already the factive character of both
> knowledge and understanding. But once we move past its facticity, the
> grasping of relations between items of information is central to the
> nature of understanding. By contrast, when we move past the facticity
> of knowledge, the central features involve non-accidental connections
> between mind and world. (Kvanvig 2003: 197)
> 
> 
> 



For instance, suppose you read a history book full of inaccurate facts
about the Comanche dominance of the Southern Plains in the nineteenth
century, but your dyslexia miraculously transforms them all into
truths (Kvanvig 2009). For Kvanvig, despite the one-in-a-billion
luckiness of your grasp's origins, you could nonetheless come to
an understanding of this topic. So long as the accuracy and internal
appropriateness conditions are satisfied, how you came by your
accurate grasp is not important.



Other philosophers have objected to Kvanvig's account. On their
view, it is implausible to think you can come to understand the world
through sheer external luck, or (perhaps worse) through being the
victim of massive deception (Grimm 2006; Pritchard 2010; Khalifa
2017b: ch. 7; Kelp 2021). Thus Pritchard claims that one needs to
acquire one's accurate grasp "in the right fashion"
(Pritchard 2010: 108) or "in the right kind of way"
(Pritchard 2010: 110)--in other words, by means of a reliable
source or method. One's grasp therefore cannot be the result of
"Gettier luck"--where, for instance, by sheer chance
a story intended to deceive you happens to be right (Pritchard
2010).



At the same time, philosophers such as Pritchard and Alison Hills hold
that understanding does tolerate *certain* kinds of luck, and
in a way that propositional knowledge does not (Pritchard 2010; Hills
2016). They therefore hold that understanding can be *partly
externally lucky.* Thus imagine your environment is filled with
misleading information about some event--the fire that destroyed
your house, for example. Suppose that only Source *X* will offer
you the truth about the fire--that faulty wiring was the
cause--while all of the other sources will offer plausible but
mistaken accounts. If you luckily rely on Source *X*, that source
can enable you to understand why the event occurred, even though it
cannot generate knowledge about why it occurred, due to the presence
of what Pritchard calls "environmental luck". The upshot,
on this view, is that while understanding is compatible with
environmental luck, it is not compatible with Gettier luck. They
conclude from this that since knowledge is compatible with neither
Gettier luck nor environmental luck, understanding is not a species of
knowledge.



(For recent empirical studies regarding the compatibility of judgments
of understanding with luck, and finding mixed support for this
compatibility, see Wilkenfeld et al. 2018; Carter et al. 2019.)



Regarding the normative profile of understanding and its relation to
knowledge, others have argued that understanding is not vulnerable to
defeat, especially in the face of known counterevidence, in the way
that knowledge is (Hills 2016; Dellsen 2017). Dellsen
for instance argues that if I come to believe or grasp that a car
engine works a certain way, and it really does work that way, then my
understanding of how the engine works is secure even if I have
(misleading) evidence that the person telling me about the engine is
unreliable (Dellsen 2017). To these philosophers, this provides
still another reason for thinking that understanding is not a species
of knowledge.


## 3. Special Issues in Epistemology


### 3.1 The Epistemic Value of Understanding



As part of what Wayne Riggs has called the "value turn in
epistemology", epistemologists have increasingly attempted to
identify the fundamental bearers of epistemic value (Riggs 2008). From
a purely epistemic point of view, is knowledge of just any sort
valuable? Or is the fundamentally valuable thing instead the ability
to provide reasons, or to possess beliefs that are in some way
"Gettier proof"?



Into this mix some have argued that the really valuable things from an
epistemic point of view are "higher grade" cognitive
accomplishments, such as understanding or wisdom (Riggs 2003; cf.
Baehr 2014). Thus by nature we do not seem to have any desire to
acquire trivial pieces of information, such as the name of the 589th
person in the 1971 Dallas phone book. But *any* instance of
understanding might seem worth pursuing or in some way worthwhile;
thus Riggs writes,



> 
> 
> it seems to me that any understanding, even of some subject matter we
> may consider trivial or mundane, contributes to the epistemic value of
> one's life. (2003: 217)
> 
> 
> 



Understanding might therefore be a better candidate for a
fundamentally valuable epistemic state than knowledge or truth.



Just why understanding might have this property is up for debate. Some
proposals focus on the "internal" benefits that
understanding is alleged to provide. According to Zagzebski (2001),
understanding has a kind of first-person transparency, tied to an
ability to articulate reasons, that we do not always find in cases of
knowledge. Thus to say a chicken-sexer *knows* the sex of a
particular chicken without being able to cite his or her grounds is
one thing, but to say that someone *understands* some subject
matter--say, the U.S. Civil War--without being able to
explain it or to describe how the subject's different elements
depend upon and relate to one another seems like another, more
implausible step (cf. Pritchard 2010). Understanding therefore
arguably provides "a more natural home" (cf. Kvanvig 2003:
1993) for internalist intuitions in epistemology than knowledge,
because it seems to more naturally appeal to notions such as
transparency, articulacy, and reason-giving than knowledge. (For the
view that understanding too can be inarticulate, see Grimm 2017.)



Another view, from Pritchard (2009, 2010), is that any instance of
understanding is valuable because it counts as an achievement, and
achievements are the kinds of things that are distinctively and
finally valuable. Instances of understanding count as achievements
(and indeed what Pritchard calls *strong* achievements) either
because they involve overcoming an obstacle or because they bring to
bear "significant cognitive ability". For Pritchard,
however, the same cannot be said for any instance of knowledge. For
example, in many cases I might come to believe the truth on the basis
of testimony, but the credit for my true belief seems to belong more
to the testifier than to me (cf. Lackey 2007). I do not reach the
truth on this question primarily because of my ability or skill, but
because of the ability or skill of the testifier; such items of
knowledge therefore do not count as achievements, and hence lack final
value.



Against this, some have objected that there are many cases of
"easy understanding" where no significant obstacle seems
to be involved, and no significant cognitive ability at play (e.g.,
Lawler 2019). For instance, it seems I could come to understand why my
tumble-dryer isn't working--because it is
unplugged--quite easily and without bringing to bear any
particularly significant cognitive ability (Carter & Gordon 2014:
5). It has therefore been claimed that not just *any* item of
understanding is valuable, and particularly not just any item of
"understanding why". Rather, only so-called *objectual
understanding* is distinctively valuable, where objectual
understanding is said to concern "wide" subject matters
that involve "a large network of propositions and relations
between those propositions" (Carter & Gordon 2014: 8; cf.
Khalifa 2017b: ch. 8).



A final proposal is that understanding is a better candidate for the
*goal of inquiry* than knowledge (Pritchard 2016; cf. Kvanvig
2003: 202 and Kelp 2021). Suppose you learn from a reliable source
that the rising and falling of the tides are due to the moon's
gravitational pull. You will then apparently have knowledge of why the
tides rise and fall, but according to Pritchard this knowledge will
not properly close your inquiry or satisfy your curiosity.



> 
> 
> Indeed, one would expect our subject to continue asking questions of
> her informant until she gains a proper explanatory grip on how cause
> and effect are related; mere knowledge of the cause will not suffice.
> (Pritchard 2016: 34)
> 
> 
> 



On this view, an explanation of how cause and effect are related is
essential to understanding why, and one's inquiry will not reach
its natural end until one resolves this question.


### 3.2 Testimony



A key issue in social epistemology is whether understanding, like
ordinary propositional knowledge, can be transmitted *via*
testimony. Thus it seems that I can transmit my knowledge to you that
the next train is arriving at 4:15, just by telling you. Transmitting
understanding, however, does not seem to work so easily, if it is
possible at all. According to Myles Burnyeat,



> 
> 
> Understanding is not transmissible in the same sense as knowledge is.
> It is not the case that in normal contexts of communication the
> expression of understanding imparts understanding to one's
> hearer as the expression of knowledge can and often does impact
> understanding. (Burnyeat 1980: 186)
> 
> 
> 



Thus a teacher might try to convey her understanding of some subject
matter--say, of how Type II Diabetes works--but there is no
guarantee that the understanding will in fact *be* transmitted,
or that her students will come to see or grasp what she herself sees
and grasps.



Supposing that understanding cannot be transmitted by testimony, there
are a few explanations for why this might be the case. For one,
Zagzebski argues that the kind of "seeing" or
"grasping" that seems integral to understanding is
something a person can only do "first hand"--it
cannot be inherited from anyone else (Zagzebski 2008: ch. 6). For
another, and according to Hills, if we agree that understanding is a
skill or ability, then understanding will be difficult or impossible
to transmit because skills and abilities in general are difficult or
impossible to transmit (Hills 2009, 2020). It is therefore a specific
case of a more general phenomena.



Others have argued that understanding is not, in fact, so difficult to
transmit. Suppose I ask why you are late for our meeting, and you tell
me "traffic". It then seems like you have transmitted your
understanding to me quite directly--apparently just as directly
as when you communicate your knowledge to me that the next train is
coming at 4:15 (Grimm 2020). What seems required for successful
transmission of understanding is thus that the right conceptual
scaffolding is in place, on the part of the recipient. But supposing
the scaffolding is in place, understanding can plausibly be
transmitted in much the way knowledge can (Boyd 2017; cf. Malfatti
2019, 2020). Others argue that since something like propositional
knowledge of causes entails at least a low degree of understanding, a
low degree of understanding can be transmitted via testimony in the
same way as knowledge can (Hu 2019).



It has also been pointed out that even if we agree that seeing or
grasping needs to be first-hand, and that others cannot do this for
me, the same "first-handedness" apparently holds for
belief. That is, no one else can *believe* for me, because
believing is a first-personal act (Hazlett forthcoming: sec. 2.3). But
just as this fact about belief does not lead us to think that
propositional knowledge cannot be transmitted, so too it should not
lead us to think that understanding cannot be transmitted (Boyd
2017).



In relation to moral testimony in particular, understanding has been
invoked to explain why it often seems odd or "fishy" to
defer to others about moral issues, such as whether eating meat is
morally wrong (for an overview, see Callahan 2020; cf. Riaz 2015). One
explanation of the fishiness is that the epistemic good we really want
with respect to moral questions is not mere knowledge but rather
understanding. It is then said, for reasons tied to those just
mentioned, that understanding cannot be easily (if at all) transmitted
by testimony--either because it is an ability, and abilities
cannot easily be transmitted (Hills 2009, 2013, 2016) or because
genuine understanding in moral matters involves a suite of emotional
and affective responses that cannot easily be transmitted by testimony
(Callahan 2018). Deferring to moral testimony is therefore fishy, it
is argued, because it does not get us the epistemic good we really
want--moral understanding.



## 4. Special Issues in the Philosophy of Science


### 4.1 Explanation and Understanding



We seek explanations for an epistemic benefit, but how should we think
about that benefit? We noted above (Section 1.2) that philosophers
such as Hempel have significant reservations about thinking about the
benefit in terms of understanding. As they point out, just as a
mistaken explanation can generate a "feeling" of
understanding in some people, so too an accurate explanation might
leave people cold.



In response to this concern, others note that the feeling of
understanding (or the phenomenology of understanding) should not be
confused with the epistemic state itself, any more than the feeling of
knowing should be confused with the epistemic state of knowledge (de
Regt 2004, 2017). But even if this move is granted, and we think of
understanding as a full-bodied epistemic state and not a mere feeling,
the relationship between explanation and understanding remains
controversial.



According to what we might call an "understanding-first"
approach to the relationship, thinking about the epistemology of
understanding is indispensable for thinking about what makes for a
good explanation. More exactly, because we seem to assess the goodness
or badness of an explanation in terms of its ability to generate
understanding, understanding is in some sense conceptually prior to,
or more basic than, the notion of explanation. Thus intuitions about
understanding are often taken to be diagnostic of the goodness (the
explanatoriness) of an explanation (Wilkenfeld 2013; cf. Wilkenfeld
& Lombrozo 2020), and if we can think of a case where all of the
conditions for the theory of explanation are met, but understanding
does not result, that is a reason to reject the sufficiency of the
conditions (see, e.g., Woodward 2003: 195, in diagnosing
Hempel's view). Similarly, if we have understanding in ways not
sanctioned by the theory, that is reason to think the conditions are
not necessary. More generally, an advocate of the
"understanding-first" approach would likely concur with
Paul Humphreys's claim that:



> 
> 
> Scientific understanding provides a far richer terrain than does
> scientific explanation and the latter is best viewed as a vehicle to
> understanding, rather than an end in itself. (Humphreys 2000: 267; cf.
> Potochnik 2017: ch. 5)
> 
> 
> 



Against understanding-first approaches, there are
"debunking" approaches according to which understanding is
of little if any help to accounts of explanation. (More positively,
these might simply be considered "explanation-first"
approaches.) Thus Khalifa argues that attempts to revive understanding
as a central notion in the philosophy of science have amounted to
little more than a repackaging of existing models of explanation
(Khalifa 2012, 2017b: ch. 3), and that strictly speaking all one needs
for a plausible account of understanding is a plausible account of
what counts as a good or correct explanation, combined with a
plausible account of knowledge. Understanding therefore amounts to
*knowing a correct explanation*. But then nothing new or
special is needed to theorize about understanding; our accounts of
explanation and our theories of knowledge do all the important
theoretical work (see especially Khalifa 2017b; cf. Kelp 2015).



Similarly, consider the following attempt, from Bradford Skow, to
characterize the relationship between explanation and
understanding:



> 
> 
> *Something *E* is an explanation of why *Q* only if
> someone who possesses *E* understands why *Q**. (Skow
> 2018: 214)
> 
> 
> 



This condition on explanation cannot help us as theorists, Skow
argues, because it is not even true. Thus suppose we construe
"possessing" an explanation as *knowing* an
explanation. Plugged into the formula, the result is that one cannot
know an explanation of why *Q* unless that knowledge constitutes
an understanding of why *Q*. But, plausibly, we can know an
explanation of why *Q* without understanding why *Q*. For
example, someone can know why the litmus paper turned
red--because it was dipped in acid--without understanding
why it turned red (Skow 2018: 215). This suggests it takes
*more* to understand why p than simply to know why p. In the
case of the litmus paper, Skow claims one also needs to appreciate
*how* the acid turns the paper red, or *why* it turns it
red.



Opinions differ about the force of such examples. According to some,
to require that understanding why p involves knowledge of mechanisms
or deeper processes in this way would annihilate most of our everyday
understanding (Grimm 2019a). Thus I can apparently understand why my
eyes are watering--because I am chopping onions--without
appreciating anything about the mechanism or connection that underlies
the watering. Others argue that there is indeed understanding in these
cases, although perhaps not a lot (Sliwa 2015).


### 4.2 Understanding and Idealization



A longstanding puzzle in the philosophy of science concerns how
idealized models and representations ("idealizations", for
short) allow cognitive access to the world. The puzzle is that
although idealizations seem to provide real epistemic benefits, the
benefits cannot apparently be identified with truth, because to the
extent that they falsify or mispresent the world, idealizations often
fail to reflect the truth. For example, idealizations often appeal to
entities that do not and perhaps cannot exist--fully rational
agents, frictionless planes, etc. Or they subtract important worldly
elements from their accounts--e.g., long range inter-molecular
forces.



Yet if idealizations provide epistemic benefits, and we cannot readily
think of the benefits in terms of truth, then how exactly should we
think about them? According to some philosophers, we should think not
in terms of truth but rather in terms of understanding. Understanding
is the epistemic benefit we receive from idealizations, and
understanding and truth can come apart. On this view, understanding
(unlike knowledge) can therefore be "non-factive" (Elgin
2004, 2017; Potochnik 2017; cf. Sullivan & Khalifa 2019).



For instance, Elgin asks us to consider a paint sample we might see in
a hardware store--say, of the shade jonquil yellow (Elgin 2017:
187). While the sample might in fact be subtly different than the
actual shade, and hence in that sense misrepresent it, it nonetheless
seems to provide epistemic access to the shade. Idealizations such as
the Ideal Gas Law or Snell's law work are then held to work in a
similar way. They represent not by mirroring but rather by
exemplifying certain aspects of the target system, and via the
mechanism of exemplification enable understanding of the system (Elgin
2017).



Others agree that idealizations enable scientists to understand the
world even though, strictly speaking, the idealizations
misrepresent their target systems. According to Angela Potochnik
(2017), this is because the systems studied by scientists are
enormously complex networks of causal patterns and interactions.
Particular interests and cognitive limitations will lead scientists to
focus on some of these causal patterns and neglect others, and they
might get those particular patterns right. In the process, however,
they will misrepresent the actual messy complexity of the target
system, and the understanding of phenomena that results will thereby
be non-factive.



For Strevens, idealizations enable understanding because they draw
attention to the difference makers that bring about the thing to be
explained (Strevens 2017). More exactly, idealizations help us to
appreciate the factors that make a difference to bringing about the
phenomena we want to explain, and to identifying the factors that do
not make a difference. The Ideal Gas Law helps us to understand the
Boylean behavior of a gas, for example, even though the law imagines
that there are zero long-range forces at work, because the existence
of those long-rage forces does not make a difference to the derivation
of the Boylean behavior: they are insignificant enough that their
values can be set to zero without loss.



One difference between theorists such as Strevens and Potochnik may
lie in the nature of the explanandum. For Potochnik, it seems clear
that the thing to be explained is a concrete, coarse-grained
phenomenon: the behavior of a gas in a container, for example. For
Strevens, it is a more abstract, fine-grained, and high-level event:
the expansion of the gas. Thus for Strevens the thing to be explained
is something along the lines of: *that* the gas expanded, not
*how* it expanded. If one were to hold the explanandum
consistent, there might be notable agreement between these views
(though see Potochnik 2016 for further discussion).


## 5. Humanistic Understanding



To this point we have mainly focused on what it takes to understand
phenomena in the natural world, such as rusting metal bars, or the
rising and falling of the tides, or the behavior of gases. A
longstanding question, however, especially in the Continental
tradition of philosophy and especially in the philosophy of the social
sciences, is whether understanding human beings and their artifacts
requires something different and distinctive from an epistemic point
of view--perhaps, for example, a distinctive set of abilities or
methodologies, tied to the distinctive objects (or, importantly,
subjects!) we are trying to understand.



Moreover, a long string of influential thinkers--starting roughly
with Giambattista Vico and continuing through figures such Wilhelm
Dilthey and R. G. Collingwood--answer this question
affirmatively. Distinctive abilities and perhaps methodologies
*do* come on the scene when we try to understand human beings,
at least when we try to understand them in a particular way. In broad
strokes, the idea is that there is a kind of understanding of other
human beings that we can only acquire by reconstructing their
perspectives--in some sense, "from within" those
perspectives and according to their own terms (cf. Ismael 2018).



Sometimes this approach has been referred to as "the
*verstehen* tradition"--in honor of its special
roots in the German tradition, and leaving untranslated the German
word for understanding (Martin 2000; Feest 2010). Alternative labels
for this approach include "the interpretative tradition",
"the historicist tradition", "the hermeneutic
tradition", and "the humanistic tradition" (for
overviews, see Hiley et al. 1992; Stueber 2012). For convenience, we
will refer to this as "the *humanistic* tradition".
It is not an essential part of this tradition that human beings can
*only* be understood by reconstructing their perspectives, but
the tradition does characteristically claim that there is special
value in trying to do so. It also typically claims that taking up
perspectives "from within" requires distinctive cognitive
resources and perhaps distinctive methods--resources and methods
that are not clearly needed when we attempt to understand natural
phenomena.



Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was among the first to try to
articulate how exactly understanding human beings differs from
understanding the natural world (see especially Vico 1725 [2002].)
According to Vico, just as we have a special *scienza*
(knowledge or understanding) of things we have made or produced
ourselves, so too we can have special insight into things that other
human beings have made or produced--where the things made or
produced included not just physical artifacts but also human actions.
Vico further postulated a special ability--*fantasia*, or
reconstructive imagination--by which we can enter into the minds
of others and see the world through their eyes and in terms of their
categories of thought (Miller 1993: ch. 5).



Further north in Europe, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)
held that because human nature is not static, or fixed irrespective of
time and place, understanding alien cultures requires a process of
*Einfuhlung*--a "feeling one's way
into"--the culture in question, in all its specificity and
perhaps with an eye to its particular genius. In Herder's hands,
however, *Einfuhlung* was not a quasi-mystical or
irrational attempt to leap into the minds of others. Instead, it was
often a slow, methodical process that needed to be aided by careful
historical-philological inquiry (Forster 2002: xvii). (For central
texts, see Herder 2002.)



In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Wilhelm Dilthey
(1833-1911) became the most celebrated advocate of the idea that
the human sciences--in German, the
*Geisteswissenschaften*, such as history--had a different
focus than the natural sciences, and centered on the idea of inner or
*lived* experience. (See Dilthey 1883 [1989] for a
characteristic work.) Someone's lived experience, moreover, was
constituted not only by their beliefs or attitudes, but also by their
emotions and volitions. For Dilthey, as Frederick Beiser puts the
idea,



> 
> 
> We understand an episode in a person's life only when we see how
> it plays a role in realizing his basic values, his conception of what
> makes life worth living. (Beiser 2011: 334)
> 
> 
> 



In England, the humanistic approach was championed especially by R. G.
Collingwood (1889-1943). According to Collingwood, what
distinguishes human history from, say, geological history, is that
human history is suffused with thought--i.e., it is a record of
human aspirations, goals, beliefs, frustrations, and so on. We can,
moreover, have two possible stances towards these thoughts. We can try
to map them from a third person point of view, and identify the
various ways the thoughts depend upon and relate to one another. But
we can also try to "re-enact" or "rethink"
them (D'Oro 2000, 2004). Thus Collingwood held that,



> 
> 
> The events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles
> for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but
> through, to discern the thought within them. (Collingwood 1946 [1993:
> 214])
> 
> 
> 


### 5.1 Perspective-taking and its Critics



A central tenet of the humanistic tradition is that when an agent has
a first-person perspective on the world, there is value in trying to
"take up" or "assume" that perspective, rather
than simply trying to map that agent's perspective from a
detached, third-person perspective. Abraham Lincoln for instance,
could presumably be understood from a third-person, detached
perspective by a psychologist adept at mapping the various ways in
which Lincoln's beliefs and desires, hopes and fears, seemed to
depend upon and relate to one another. What the humanistic tradition
says is that even if the psychologist were to do this exquisitely, so
that all of these relationships were accurately plotted, there would
still be an important sort of understanding missing--an
understanding of what it was like to be Lincoln from the inside, or to
regard the world as he regarded it, at least in part.



Philosophers differ about the epistemic value of this project of
perspective-taking. Thus some claim that there are certain
*facts* that only show up from a first-person point of view
(Nagel 1974), and hence can only be apprehended from that point of
view. For instance, if I want to apprehend facts about "what it
is like" to experience the world from your perspective, I
arguably need to try to place myself, somehow, in that perspective.
Others claim that certain *concepts* only show up for us from a
first-personal, engaged perspective. For instance, perhaps the concept
of chronic pain can only be acquired by someone who has experienced
it, or the concept of romantic love, or racial bigotry. A related view
is that while these concepts can perhaps be *acquired* without
the relevant first-person experience, they cannot be adequately
grasped or mastered without that experience. As Stephen Turner
writes:



When a mother tells her 13 year old daughter that she does not know
what "love" is, she is not making a comment about
semantics; she is pointing to the nonlinguistic experiential
conditions that are bound up with the understanding of the term that
the daughter does not share. (Turner 2019: 254)



The thought here seems to be that while the daughter might have the
concept of love, her grasp of the concept will be extremely poor
without the benefit of the first-person experience, and her attempts
to apply it will be unreliable.



In fields such as anthropology, ethnography, and sociology, and in the
philosophical areas that reflect on these disciplines (primarily, the
philosophy of social science), questions related to the epistemic
value of perspective-taking gave rise to debates about whether it is
necessary to immerse oneself in a society in order to understand it
adequately. According to some, the answer is "yes": if I
want to understand a society or culture, I need to understand it from
the participants' perspective, with special sensitivity to the
concepts and rules that guide the participants' perspective,
even if only implicitly (see especially Winch 1958, 1964). It is then
sometimes claimed that one can only really grasp or master these
concepts by participating in the relevant form of life. As the
ethnographer James Spradley writes:



> 
> 
> Immersion is the time-honored strategy used by most ethnographers. By
> cutting oneself off from other interests and concerns, by listening to
> informants hours on end, by participating in the cultural scene, and
> by allowing one's mental life to be taken over by the new
> culture, themes [the implicit beliefs of a culture] often emerge
> ... This type of immersion will often reveal new relationships
> among domains and bring to light cultural themes you cannot discover
> any other way. (Spradley 1980: 145; cf. Kampa 2019)
> 
> 
> 



Another view is that immersion, while perhaps helpful, is not strictly
necessary. What is necessary is recognizing the priority of the
participants' perspective, and using that perspective to
characterize the activities that need to be understood in the first
place (Taylor 1971; McCarthy 1973). If we want to make sense of what
looks like (say) voting or praying in another culture, we need to
adopt that culture's way of identifying what counts as voting or
praying (which perhaps will turn out to be a distinct but closely
related activity, such as voting\* or praying\*). Carving up the
behavior according to our *own* categories will only
misrepresent what is happening and lead to misunderstanding.



Peter Winch, among others, further argues that it is hard or
impossible to try to adopt another culture's way of carving up
the world without somehow taking that culture on board in a holistic
way, because it is hard or impossible to characterize particular bits
of behavior in isolation (Winch 1958). To make sense of what a
medieval knight means by praying (or praying\*), for example, I might
need to connect this with other concepts (perhaps such as honor, or
duty, or salvation) that again might be quite different than my own.
The result might then be that one gradually acquires what Alasdair
MacIntyre calls a "second first language", as one's
grasp of the relationships between different concepts and their
applications increases (MacIntyre 1988: ch. 19).



Against the push for perspective-taking as a source of understanding,
especially in the social sciences, at least three strains of criticism
arose: Positivist, Critical, and Gadamerian.



The Positivist critique--associated with thinkers such as
Theodore Abel (1948), Ernest Nagel (1953), and Richard Rudner
(1966)--had a number of prongs. For one thing, there were grave
doubts about the reliability of the processes associated with
perspective taking. After all, it seems all too easy to project
one's own cares and concerns onto the minds of others. It was
also argued that reliving experiences, to the extent that this is
possible, does not actually amount to an explanation of why the
experiences happened. I could, after all, have lived through a series
of events myself, but not been able to explain or understand
them--so why should imaginatively living through someone
else's experiences, to the extent this is possible,
automatically grant me understanding? (For an overview of these
objections, see Martin 2000; Fay 2016; Beiser 2019.)



Critical Theorists have argued that the first-person perspective is
not the most theoretically or politically important perspective,
because it often masks deeper and more significant sources of behavior
(see Warnke 2019). The deeper sources might include an agent's
own, unacknowledged motivations, or they might include the
presuppositions, power dynamics, and economic conditions of the
society that shaped the possibility spaces in which the agent moves.
It is thus what happens "behind the back" of the subject
that is often crucial for truly understanding behavior--the
hidden impulses and power dynamics and systems of oppression that are
often obscured from the perspective of the agent, sometimes in an
unacknowledged way by the agent herself. (Here we also find
influential Marxist and Feminist analyses and critiques. See Alcoff
2005; Warnke 2014.) A hybrid view, from Habermas, is that we need
to be able to shift back and forth between the subject's
perspective and the structural perspective, if we are to properly
understand the reality of social life (Habermas 1981 [1984/1987]; for
an overview, see Baynes 2016).



The Gadamerian critique, finally, is that we can never fully jump
outside of our own cares and concerns in order to adopt the cares and
concerns of others. Reliving or re-experiencing-- in the sense of
transposing ourselves *out* of our framework and *into*
the framework of other agents or cultures--is thus an impossible
ideal. Instead, we always take our frameworks with us (Gadamer 1960
[1989]). For Gadamer, what understanding others--and especially
their written or spoken words--requires is not transposing
ourselves into their worldviews, but trying to fuse our worldviews in
some way (*Horizontverschmelzung*). Perhaps, for example, my
conception of voting or prayer will become enlarged or modified by
engaging with the conceptions I find in other cultures, and perhaps
especially through a dialogue with the texts of those cultures.
Whether this fusion essentially amounts to a project of translation
(from one worldview to another), or something else is a matter for
debate. (See Vessey 2009 for an overview.)


### 5.2 Understanding as an Ontological Category



An additional question, especially in the Continental tradition, is
whether we should think of understanding primarily in epistemic terms.
Perhaps it is better to think of understanding as an
*ontological* category--a way of being in the
world--rather than an epistemic one (for an overview, see
Feher 2016).



According to Heidegger's influential account, for instance,
understanding is not a cognitive act that we might or might not
perform. Rather, it is our fundamental way of living in the world, and
we are "always already" engaged in understanding. Thus he
writes that:



> 
> 
> Understanding is not an acquaintance derived from knowledge, but a
> primordially existential kind of being, which, more than anything
> else, makes such knowledge and acquaintance possible (123-4;
> trans. by Wrathall 2013).
> 
> 
> 



Just as Descartes spoke of himself as a *res cogitans*--a
thinking thing--so for Heidegger we are, fundamentally,
understanding things. As Gadamer elaborates the Heideggerian idea:



> 
> 
> Understanding is... the original form of the realization of
> Dasein, which is being-in-the-world. Before any differentiation of
> understanding into the various directions of pragmatic or theoretical
> interest, understanding is Dasein's mode of being. (Gadamer 1960
> [1989: 259])
> 
> 
> 



One central element of this view is that we are always projecting
possibilities onto the world around us. Or rather, it is not as if the
world first presents itself as a bare thing empty of possibilities,
and then we construe it as possessing these possibilities; instead,
our experience of the world is from the first suffused with this sense
of possibility. To take an example that Samantha Matherne (2019) uses
to illustrate Heidegger's view: when I first apprehend the
martini in front of me, I take it as offering a variety of
possibilities--to be sipped, to be thrown, to be shaken, to be
stirred. If I then take the martini as to be sipped, I am seizing on
one of these possibilities and interpreting the martini in light of
this specific possibility. But my experience of the drink was never
devoid of an apprehension of possibilities altogether.



A further question is why, on the Heideggerian framework, the state of
projecting possibilities does not count as epistemic or
truth-evaluable, even if we allow that it is also in some sense
ontological. After all, the possibilities that we project onto the
world might not be genuine or grounded in reality. As Grimm (2008)
notes, someone might think that apparently solid things (like
baseballs) could not possibly pass through other apparently solid
things (like tables), but learning about quantum tunneling might call
this into question, and transform one's sense of possibility.
There thus seem to be facts about the possibilities that the world
affords, and it seems like a mind could either track these facts
accurately, or not. But this appears to be a topic of interest not
just to ontologists or metaphysicians, but to epistemologists as well
(cf. Westphal 1999).