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What does it mean to understand something? What types of
understanding can be distinguished? Is understanding always
provided by explanations? And how is it related to knowledge? Such
questions have attracted considerable interest in epistemology
recently. These discussions, however, have not yet engaged insights
about explanations and theories developed in philosophy of science.
Conversely, philosophers of science have debated the nature of
explanations and theories, while dismissing understanding as a
psychological by-product. In this book, epistemologists and
philosophers of science together address basic questions about the
nature of understanding, providing a new overview of the field.
False theories, cognitive bias, transparency, coherency, and other
important issues are discussed. Its 15 original chapters are
essential reading for researchers and graduate students interested
in the current debates about understanding.
What does it mean to understand something? What types of
understanding can be distinguished? Is understanding always
provided by explanations? And how is it related to knowledge? Such
questions have attracted considerable interest in epistemology
recently. These discussions, however, have not yet engaged insights
about explanations and theories developed in philosophy of science.
Conversely, philosophers of science have debated the nature of
explanations and theories, while dismissing understanding as a
psychological by-product. In this book, epistemologists and
philosophers of science together address basic questions about the
nature of understanding, providing a new overview of the field.
False theories, cognitive bias, transparency, coherency, and other
important issues are discussed. Its 15 original chapters are
essential reading for researchers and graduate students interested
in the current debates about understanding.
What does it mean to understand something? What is the essence of
understanding, when compared across multiple domains? Varieties of
Understanding offers new and original work on the nature of
understanding, raising questions about what understanding looks
like from different perspectives and exploring how ordinary people
use the notion of understanding. According to a long historical
tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In
particular, it is said that understanding people has a different
epistemic profile than understanding the natural world-that it
calls on different cognitive resources and brings to bear
distinctive normative considerations. Thus, in order to understand
people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically
reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way.
By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like
earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of
sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed-mainly because there
are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no
perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. This volume
brings together some of the world's leading philosophers,
psychologists, and theologians in order to shed light on the
various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on
this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.
Making Sense of the World offers original work on the nature of
understanding by a range of distinguished philosophers. Although
some of the essays are by scholars well known for their work on
understanding, many of the essays bring entirely new figures to the
discussion. The main purpose of the volume is twofold: to advance
debates in epistemology and the philosophy of science, where work
on understanding has recently flourished, and to jumpstart new
questions and debates about understanding in other areas of
philosophy, such as aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of
religion.
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