Epistemology is a branch in philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge. On the basis of considerations Pritchard argues for in various places (2010; 2012; 2013; 2014), relating to cognitive achievements presence in the absence of knowledge (for example. Zagzebski, L. Recovering Understanding In M. Steup (ed. A useful taxonomising question is the following: how strong a link does understanding demand between the beliefs we have about a given subject matter and the propositions that are true of that subject matter? The possession of such judgment plausibly lines up more closely with ability possession (that is, (i)-(vi)) than with propositional attitude possession. If Pritchard is right to claim that understanding is always a strong cognitive achievement, then understanding is always finally valuable if cognitive achievement is also always finally valuable, and moreover, valuable in a way that knowledge is not. The Pros And Cons Of Epistemology - 824 Words | Bartleby epistemological shift pros and cons - singhaniatabletting.in If making reasonable sense merely requires that some event or experience make sense to the epistemic agent herself, Bakers view appears open, as Grimm (2011) has suggested, to counterexamples according to which an agent knows that something happened and yet accounts for that occurrence by way of a poorly supported theory. Regarding factivity, then, it seems there is room for a view that occupies the middle ground here. Discusses and defines ability in the sense often appealed to in work on cognitive ability and the value of knowledge. Zagzebski notes that this easily leads to a vicious circle because neglect leads to fragmentation of meaning, which seems to justify further neglect and further fragmentation until eventually a concept can disappear entirely.. So too does the fact that one would rather have a success involving an achievement than a mere success, even when this difference has no pragmatic consequences. Olsson, E. Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification in E. Zalta (ed. A discussion of whether linguistic understanding is a form of knowledge. If this is right, then at least one prominent case used to illustrate a luck-based difference between knowledge and understanding does not hold up to scrutiny. Should we say that the use of the term understanding that applies to such cases should be of no interest to epistemology? 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. A monograph that explores the nature and value of achievements in great depth. Make sure you cite them appropriately within your paper and list them in APA format on your Reference page. The Pros And Cons Of Epistemology - 1280 Words | Cram With these three types of understanding in mindpropositional understanding, understanding-why and objectual understandingthe next section considers some of the key questions that arise when one attempts to think about when, and under what conditions, understanding should be ascribed to epistemic agents. 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. A. and Gordon, E. C. Norms of Assertion: The Quantity and Quality of Epistemic Support. Philosophia 39(4) (2011): 615-635. Riggs (2003: 21-22) asks whether an explanation has to be true to provide understanding, and Strevens thinks that it is implied that grasping is factive. Much of the philosophical tradition has viewed the central epistemological problems concerning perception largely and sometimes exclusively in terms of the metaphysical responses to skepticism. The guiding task was to clarify what versions of historical epistemology exist and the pros and cons each of them presents. An epistemological shift: from evidence-based medicine to One point that could potentially invite criticism is the move from (1) and (2) to (3). However, Baker (2003) has offered an account on which at least some instances of understanding-why are non-factive. 1. Some of Pritchards (for example, 2009) earlier work on understanding uses the terminology atomistic understanding as synonymous with understanding-why and indeed his more recent work shifts to using the latter term. Elgin, C. Z. This is a change from the past. According to his positive proposal, objectual understanding is the goal and what typically sates the appetite associated with curiosity. Kvanvig 2003; Zagzebski 2001; Riggs 2003; Pritchard 2010), Grimms view is rooted in a view that comes from the philosophy of science and traces originally to Aristotle. On the view he recommends, the ability to grasp explanatory or evidential connections is an ability that is central to understanding only if the relevant grasping ability is understood as involving reliable explanatory evaluation. Men ), Knowledge, Virtue and Action. There is little work focusing exclusively on the prospects of a non-factive construal of understanding-why; most authors, with a few exceptions, take it that understanding-why is obviously factive in a way that is broadly analogous to propositional knowledge. This is a change from the past. Specifically, Hills outlines six different abilities that she takes to be involved in grasping the reasons why pabilities which effectively constitute, on her view, six necessary conditions for understanding why p. These six abilities allow one to be able to treat q as the reason why p, not merely believe or know that q is the reason why p. They are as follows: (i) an ability to follow another persons explanation of why p. (ii) an ability to explain p in ones own words. Although, many commentators suggest that understanding requires something further, that is something in additional to merely knowing a proposition or propositions, Grimm thinks we can update the knowledge of causes view so that this intuition is accommodated and explained. If so, then the internally consistent delusion objection typically leveled against weakly nonfactive views raises its head. (iii) an ability to draw from the information that q the conclusion that p (or that probably p). Would this impede ones understanding? 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. A second variety of understanding that has generated interest amongst epistemologists is, understanding-why. Wilkenfeld suggests that this ability consists at least partly in being able to correct minor mistakes in ones mental representation and use it to make assessments in similar cases. Epistemological assumptions are those that focus on what can be known and how knowledge can be acquired (Bell, 8). According to Zagzebski (2001), the epistemic value of understanding is tied not to elements of its factivity, but rather to its transparency. Meanwhile, he suggests that were you to ask a fake fire officer who appeared to you to be a real officer and just happened to give the correct answer, it is no longer plausible (by Pritchards lights) that you have understanding-why. The Pros And Cons Of Epistemology. 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. This objection is worth holding in mind when considering any further positions that incorporate representation manipulability as necessary. The surgeons successful bypass is valued differently when one is made aware that it was by luck that he picked an appropriate blood vessel for the bypass. A Seismic Shift in Epistemology | EDUCAUSE These retractions do not t seem to make sense on the weak view. And, relatedly in social epistemology, we might wonder what if any testimonial transmission principles hold for understanding, and whether there are any special hearer conditions demanded by testimonial understanding acquisition that are not shared in cases of testimonial knowledge acquisition. Grimm does not make the further claim that understanding is a kind of know-howhe merely says that there is similarity regarding the object, which does not guarantee that the activity of understanding and know-how are so closely related. Displacements of power in the realm of concepts accompany these new orientations. We could, for convenience, use the honorific term subjective knowledge for false belief, though in doing so, we are no longer talking about knowledge in the sense that epistemologists are interested in, any more than we are when, as Allan Hazlett (2010) has drawn attention to, we say things like Trapped in the forest, I knew I was going to die; Im so lucky I was saved. Perhaps the same should be said about alleged subjective understanding: to the extent that it is convenient to refer to non-factive states of intelligibility as states of understanding, we are no longer talking about the kind of valuable cognitive achievement of interest to epistemologists. 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. For example, Hills (2009: 4) says you cannot understand why p if p is false (compare: S knows that p only if p). 1. Usually philosophical problems are overcome not by their resolution but rather by redefinition. To the extent that these worries with transparency are apt, a potential obstacle emerges for the prospects of accounting for the value of understanding in terms of its transparency. epistemological shift pros and cons - roci.biz An overview of the object, psychology, and normativity of understanding. Having abandoned the commitment to absolute space, current astronomers can no longer say that the Earth travels around the sun simpliciter, but must talk about how the Earth and the sun move relative to each other. 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. 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. This is the idea that one has shifted, or changed, the way he or she takes in knowledge. In so doing, he notes that the reader may be inclined to add further internalist requirements to his reliability requirement, of the sort put forward by Kvanvig (2003). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Epistemology is the study of sources of knowledge. The cons of the epistemology shift that is a major - Course Hero Hills thinks that mere propositional knowledge does not essentially involve any of these abilities even if (as per the point above) propositional knowledge requires other kinds of abilities. The idea of grasping* is useful insofar as it makes clearer the cognitive feat involved in intelligibility, which is similar to understanding in the sense that it implies a grasping of order, pattern and connection between propositions (Riggs, 2004), but it does not require those propositions to be true. While the matter of how to think about the incompatibility of knowledge with epistemic luck remains a contentious pointfor instance, here modal accounts (for example, Pritchard 2005) are at odds with lack-of-control accounts (for example, Riggs 2007), few contemporary epistemologists dissent from the comparatively less controversial claim that knowledge excludes luck in a way that true beliefs and sometimes even justified true beliefs do not (see Hetherington (2013) for a dissenting position). Though the demandingness of this ability need not be held fixed across practical circumstances. Includes Alstons view of curiosity, according to which the epistemic value of true belief and knowledge partially comes from a link to curiosity. Whitcomb, D. Epistemic Value In A. Cullison (ed. As it turns out, not all philosophers who give explanation a central role in an account of understanding want to dispense with talk of grasping altogether, and this is especially so in the case of objectual understanding. One natural place to start will be to examine the relationship between understanding and epistemic luck. Her line is that understanding-why involves (i) knowing what something is, and (ii) making reasonable sense of it. This is the idea that one has shifted, or changed, the way he or she takes in knowledge. Secondly, even subject matters that traffic in empirical rather than abstract atemporal phenomena (for example, pure mathematics), are not clearly such that understanding them should involve any appreciation for their coming to be, or their being caused to exist. As Zagzebski (2009: 141) remarks, different uses of understanding seem to mean so many different things that it is hard to identify the state that has been ignored (italics added). Firstly, achievement is often defined as success that is because of ability (see, for example, Greco 2007), where the most sensible interpretation of this claim is to see the because as signifying a casual-explanatory relationshipthis is, at least, the dominant view. On such a view, grasping talk could simply be jettisoned altogether. With each step in the sequence, we understand the motion of the planets better than we did before. Grimm (2011) calls this subjective understanding. He describes subjective understanding as being merely a grasp of how specific propositions interlinkone that does not depend on their truth but rather on their forming a coherent picture. In other words, S knows that p only if p is true. Endorses the idea that when we consider how things would be if something was true, we increase our access to further truths. Gordon, E. C. Is There Propositional Understanding? Logos & Episteme 3 (2012): 181-192. If, as robust virtue epistemologists have often insisted, cognitive achievement is finally valuable (that is, as an instance of achievements more generally), and understanding necessarily lines up with cognitive achievement but knowledge only sometimes does, then the result is a revisionary story about epistemic value. While his view fits well with understanding-why, it is less obvious that objectual understanding involves grasping how things came to be. Outlines and evaluates the anti-intellectualist and intellectualist views of know-how. To the extent that this is right, Zagzebski is endorsing a kind of KU principle (compare: KK). It is moreover of interest to note that Khalifa (2013b) also sees a potential place for the notion of grasping in an account of understanding, though in a qualified sense. See further Bradford (2013; 2015) for resistance to the very suggestion that there can be weak achievements on Pritchards sensenamely, achievements that do not necessarily involve great effort, regardless of whether they are primarily due to ability.
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