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Understanding
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Understanding
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Stephen Grimm
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Understanding
First published Thu May 6, 2021

Understanding is a protean concept in philosophy, and the desire for

understanding is pervasive in everyday life. Scientists take it as their goal
to understand the world and how it works, teachers and parents hope to
transmit understanding to their students and children, and from a political
and social point of view we often strive for mutual understanding.

This entry will look at some ways in which understanding has been
conceptualized by philosophers—especially epistemologists, philosophers
of science, and philosophers of social science. The focus will be on
accounts of understanding the natural world and other people, and it will
only touch occasionally on accounts of what it takes to understand other
items, such as concepts, languages, or texts.

1. Contexts
1.1 Ancient Philosophy
1.2 Epistemology & Philosophy of Science
2. Theoretical Frameworks
2.1 Objects of Understanding
2.2 Psychology of Understanding
2.3 Normativity of Understanding
3. Special Issues in Epistemology
3.1 The Epistemic Value of Understanding
3.2 Testimony
4. Special Issues in the Philosophy of Science
4.1 Explanation and Understanding
4.2 Understanding and Idealization
5. Humanistic Understanding
5.1 Perspective-taking and its Critics

1
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5.2 Understanding as an Ontological Category

Bibliography
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries

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

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 Stephen Grimm

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

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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.

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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

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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

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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:

a. understanding’s distinctive object (or objects),

b. its distinctive psychology, and
c. 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

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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

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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:

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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

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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; Dellsén 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.

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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.)

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 Stephen Grimm

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

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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
Spirtes, 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.

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 Stephen Grimm

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

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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.

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

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 Stephen Grimm

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

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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).

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 Stephen Grimm

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

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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”—

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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; Dellsén 2017). Dellsén 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 (Dellsén 2017). To these philosophers,

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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 Einfühlung—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,
Einfühlung 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,

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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

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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:

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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).

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 Stephen Grimm

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

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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
Fehér 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:

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 Stephen Grimm

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

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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).

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Related Entries
Collingwood, Robin George | Dilthey, Wilhelm | episteme and techne [=
scientific knowledge and expertise] | epistemology | epistemology: virtue |
Gadamer, Hans-Georg | Herder, Johann Gottfried von | hermeneutics |

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knowledge, value of | scientific explanation | testimony: epistemological

problems of | Vico, Giambattista

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the following for helpful comments and conversations

regarding previous versions of this entry: Laura Callahan, Henk de Regt,
Catherine Elgin, John Greco, Crina Gschwandtner, Michael Hannon,
Xingming Hu, Tania Lombrozo, Federica Malfatti, Kevin McCain, Keith
McPartland, Soazig le Bihan, Angela Potochnik, Constantine Sandis,
Armin Schulz, Whitney Schwab, Bhavya Sharma, Brad Skow, Michael
Strevens, Karsten Stueber, Emily Sullivan, Daryl Tress, Rene van
Woudenberg, Daniel Wilkenfeld, and Bryan Williams. Special thanks to
Kareem Khalifa for careful discussion of the final version.

Copyright © 2021 by the author

Stephen Grimm

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