Understanding and Conscious Experience

✍ Scribed by Andrei Ionuț Mărăşoiu, Mircea Dumitru (eds.)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 258
• Series: Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume explores how understanding relates to conscious experience. In doing so, it builds bridges between different philosophical disciplines and provides a metaphysically robust characterization of understanding, both in and beyond science.

The past two decades have witnessed growing interest from epistemologists, philosophers of science, philosophers of mind and ethicists in the nature and value of intellectual understanding. This volume features original essays on understanding and the phenomenal experiences that underlie it. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. Part 1 provides theoretical characterizations of understanding, including Henk de Regt’s defense of a contextual theory of scientific understanding and a debate on whether scientific inference and explanatory power are necessary or central features of understanding. Part 2 explores how conscious experience and understanding are related. The chapters articulate a phenomenal theory of understanding and address themes that are connected to understanding, including awareness, transformative experiences and exemplification. Finally, Part 3 is devoted to domain-specific inquiries about understanding, such as logical proofs, particle physics and moral understanding.

Understanding and Conscious Experience will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in the philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics and phenomenology.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Introduction
0.1 Introduction
0.2 Help from grammar?
0.3 Understanding along many dimensions
0.4 Peer expert disagreement
0.5 Inference
0.6 Skills
0.7 Ignorance and fault
0.8 Experience
0.9 Content and attitude
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Part I: What is Understanding?
Chapter 1: Understanding in science and beyond
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Scientific understanding: What it is, and what it is not
1.3 An example: Understanding the quantum world
1.4 Intuitive understanding in science and music
1.5 Expertise and public understanding of science
1.6 Conclusion
Acknowledgment
Notes
References
Chapter 2: The nature and value of understanding
2.1 Introductory remarks
2.2 The knowledge account of understanding
2.3 Knowledge without understanding
2.4 Knowledge, understanding and epistemic luck
2.5 Knowledge, understanding and achievement
2.6 The value of understanding
Notes
References
Chapter 3: Understanding and inference in recent works on scientific understanding
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The ‘use’ account of understanding in Elgin’s True Enough ( 2017)
3.3 The ‘use’ account of understanding in Khalifa’s Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge ( 2017)
3.4 The ‘use’ account of understanding in de Regt’s Understanding Scientific Understanding ( 2017)
3.5 The minimal inferential account of understanding and its corollaries
3.6 Conclusions
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Chapter 4: Defending understanding without explanation
4.1 Introduction
4.2 UwE in the understanding debate
4.3 Introducing Lipton’s approach
4.4 Khalifa’s approach to scientific understanding and his general argumentative strategy toward UwE
4.5 Objecting to Khalifa’s reconstruction of Lipton’s argument
4.6 The ‘greater than’ strategy
4.7 The Right Track Objection (RTO) and proto-understanding (PU)
4.8 Conclusions
Notes
References
Part II: Understanding and Consciousness
Chapter 5: A phenomenal theory of grasping and understanding
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Target and methodology
5.3 Candidate accounts
5.4 Experientialism: A first pass
5.5 Partial grasping
5.6 Non-occurrent grasping
5.7 Application to the paradigm cases
5.8 Experientialism generalized
5.9 Objections
5.10 Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Chapter 6: Awareness, apperception and understanding
6.1 Conditions on reflective endorsement
6.2 Knowledge
6.3 Understanding
6.4 Objectual understanding
6.5 The spectatorial stance
6.6 The agential stance
6.7 Know thyself (or anyway understand thyself)
6.8 Collective apperception
6.9 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 7: Understanding identity transformative experiences
7.1 Introduction
7.2 New kinds of experiences, token experiences, familiar experiences and experience deprivation
7.3 Voluntary and non-voluntary, individual and collective experiences
7.4 Kinds of epistemically transformative experiences
7.5 Identity transformation, individual and collective
7.6 Conclusion: The matrix of transformative experiences
Notes
References
Chapter 8: Ways of understanding the phenomenal: The cases of pictorial representation and exemplification
8.1 From knowledge and truth to understanding and rightness
8.2 Understanding the phenomenal (I). The case of pictorial representation
8.3 Understanding the phenomenal (II). Symbolizing by exemplification
8.4 Pluralism and ways of understanding
8.5 Conclusion: More than affinities between the arts and sciences
Notes
Bibliography
Part III: Domain-specific Understanding
Chapter 9: “Feeling the proof”: Is there such a thing as a phenomenology of reasoning?
9.1 Knowledge and justified true belief
9.2 Cognitive phenomenology; semantic/cognitive qualia
9.3 Rigor and intuition
9.4 The preeminence of the Euclidean geometry
9.5 Modal frame incompleteness
9.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Recalcitrant anomalies, ignorance, insights and scientific understanding: A structuralist approach
10.1 Introduction
10.2 The basics of (genuine) understanding
10.2.1 The subjectivity of making sense
10.2.2 The objectivity of understanding
10.2.3 The emergent features of understanding
10.3 Understanding and success: The main problem
10.3.1 Understanding as the result of success
10.3.2 The gradability of understanding and its connection with ignorance
10.4 Ignorance, anomalies and insights
10.4.1 Recalcitrant anomalies as cases of ignorance
10.4.2 Insights for the solution of recalcitrant anomalies
10.5 From ignorance to understanding: A structuralist perspective
10.5.1 A structuralist take on understanding
10.5.2 The dynamic character of understanding
10.6 From anomalies to ignorance, to insights and to understanding
10.6.1 The road from ignorance to understanding
10.6.2 Understanding the anomaly of Mercury’s perihelion
10.7 Final remarks
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Chapter 11: Moral Understanding
11.1 Introduction
11.2 Hills
11.2.1 Hills’s account
11.2.2 Problems for Hills
11.3 Sliwa
11.3.1 Sliwa’s view
11.3.2 Problems for Sliwa
11.4 The systematic knowledge account of moral understanding
11.5 Comparison with the competition
11.5.1 Hills
11.5.2 Sliwa
11.6 An objection to knowledge-based accounts of moral understanding why
11.7 Conclusion
Notes
References
Index