•  1176
    Understanding, grasping and luck
    Episteme 10 (1): 1-17. 2013.
    Recently, it has been debated as to whether understanding is a species of explanatory knowledge. Those who deny this claim frequently argue that understanding, unlike knowledge, can be lucky. In this paper I argue that current arguments do not support this alleged compatibility between understanding and epistemic luck. First, I argue that understanding requires reliable explanatory evaluation, yet the putative examples of lucky understanding underspecify the extent to which subjects possess this…Read more
  •  1159
    Inference, Explanation, and Asymmetry
    Synthese (Suppl 4): 929-953. 2018.
    Explanation is asymmetric: if A explains B, then B does not explain A. Tradition- ally, the asymmetry of explanation was thought to favor causal accounts of explanation over their rivals, such as those that take explanations to be inferences. In this paper, we develop a new inferential approach to explanation that outperforms causal approaches in accounting for the asymmetry of explanation.
  •  1129
    Is understanding explanatory or objectual?
    Synthese 190 (6): 1153-1171. 2013.
    Jonathan Kvanvig has argued that “objectual” understanding, i.e. the understanding we have of a large body of information, cannot be reduced to explanatory concepts. In this paper, I show that Kvanvig fails to establish this point, and then propose a framework for reducing objectual understanding to explanatory understanding
  •  1105
    Understanding, Truth, and Epistemic Goals
    Philosophy of Science 87 (5): 944-956. 2020.
    Several argue that truth cannot be science’s sole epistemic goal, for it would fail to do justice to several scientific practices that advance understanding. I challenge these arguments, but only after making a small concession: science’s sole epistemic goal is not truth as such; rather, its goal is finding true answers to relevant questions. Using examples from the natural and social sciences, I then show that scientific understanding’s epistemically valuable features are either true answers to…Read more
  •  1029
    Non-factive Understanding: A Statement and Defense
    with Yannick Doyle, Spencer Egan, and Noah Graham
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (3): 345-365. 2019.
    In epistemology and philosophy of science, there has been substantial debate about truth’s relation to understanding. “Non-factivists” hold that radical departures from the truth are not always barriers to understanding; “quasi-factivists” demur. The most discussed example concerns scientists’ use of idealizations in certain derivations of the ideal gas law from statistical mechanics. Yet, these discussions have suffered from confusions about the relevant science, as well as conceptual confusion…Read more
  •  893
    Counterfactuals and Explanatory Pluralism
    with Gabriel Doble and Jared Millson
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4): 1439-1460. 2018.
    Recent literature on non-causal explanation raises the question as to whether explanatory monism, the thesis that all explanations submit to the same analysis, is true. The leading monist proposal holds that all explanations support change-relating counterfactuals. We provide several objections to this monist position. 1Introduction2Change-Relating Monism's Three Problems3Dependency and Monism: Unhappy Together4Another Challenge: Counterfactual Incidentalism4.1High-grade necessity4.2Unity in div…Read more
  •  847
    Realism and Antirealism
    In Lee C. McIntyre & Alexander Rosenberg (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science, Routledge. pp. 254-269. 2016.
    Our best social scientific theories try to tell us something about the social world. But is talk of a “social world” a metaphor that we ought not take too seriously? In particular, do the denizens of the social world—cultural values like the Protestant work ethic, firms like ExxonMobil, norms like standards of dress and behavior, institutions like the legal system, teams like FC Barcelona, conventions like marriages—exist? The question is not merely academic. Social scientists use these differen…Read more
  •  835
    Must Understanding Be Coherent?
    In Stephen Grimm, Christoph Baumberger & Sabine Ammon (eds.), Explaining understanding: new perspectives from epistemology and philosophy of science, Routledge. pp. 139-164. 2016.
    Several authors suggest that understanding and epistemic coherence are tightly connected. Using an account of understanding that makes no appeal to coherence, I explain away the intuitions that motivate this position. I then show that the leading coherentist epistemologies only place plausible constraints on understanding insofar as they replicate my own account’s requirements. I conclude that understanding is only superficially coherent.
  •  512
    Decoupling Topological Explanations from Mechanisms
    Philosophy of Science 90 (2). 2023.
    We provide three innovations to recent debates about whether topological or “network” explanations are a species of mechanistic explanation. First, we more precisely characterize the requirement that all topological explanations are mechanistic explanations and show scientific practice to belie such a requirement. Second, we provide an account that unifies mechanistic and non-mechanistic topological explanations, thereby enriching both the mechanist and autonomist programs by highlighting when a…Read more
  •  493
    Perspectives, Questions, and Epistemic Value
    In Michela Massimi (ed.), Knowledge From a Human Point of View, Springer Verlag. pp. 87-106. 2019.
    Many epistemologists endorse true-belief monism, the thesis that only true beliefs are of fundamental epistemic value. However, this view faces formidable counterexamples. In response to these challenges, we alter the letter, but not the spirit, of true-belief monism. We dub the resulting view “inquisitive truth monism”, which holds that only true answers to relevant questions are of fundamental epistemic value. Which questions are relevant is a function of an inquirer’s perspective, which is ch…Read more
  •  463
    The Directionality of Topological Explanations
    with Daniel Kostić
    Synthese (5-6): 14143-14165. 2021.
    Proponents of ontic conceptions of explanation require all explanations to be backed by causal, constitutive, or similar relations. Among their justifications is that only ontic conceptions can do justice to the ‘directionality’ of explanation, i.e., the requirement that if X explains Y , then not-Y does not explain not-X . Using topological explanations as an illustration, we argue that non-ontic conceptions of explanation have ample resources for securing the directionality of explanations. Th…Read more
  •  449
    Integrating Philosophy of Understanding with the Cognitive Sciences
    with Farhan Islam, J. P. Gamboa, Daniel Wilkenfeld, and Daniel Kostić
    Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 16. 2022.
    We provide two programmatic frameworks for integrating philosophical research on understanding with complementary work in computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. First, philosophical theories of understanding have consequences about how agents should reason if they are to understand that can then be evaluated empirically by their concordance with findings in scientific studies of reasoning. Second, these studies use a multitude of explanations, and a philosophical theory of understanding…Read more
  •  404
    In earlier work, I criticized de Regt’s contextual theory of understanding, and advertised the advantages of my own, knowledge-based account. Using the early history of the standard model in particle physics as an illustration, I instead consider the benefits of unifying these two accounts of understanding. I argue that de Regt’s account substantially improves my own account of explanatory consideration, and that my account of explanatory comparison substantially improves upon his account of exp…Read more
  •  393
    The Role of Explanation in Understanding
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (1): 161-187. 2013.
    Peter Lipton has argued that understanding can exist in the absence of explanation. We argue that this does not denigrate explanation's importance to understanding. Specifically, we show that all of Lipton's examples are consistent with the idea that explanation is the ideal of understanding, i.e. other modes of understanding ought to be assessed by how well they replicate the understanding provided by a good and correct explanation. We defend this idea by showing that for all of Lipton's exampl…Read more
  •  321
    Idealizations and Understanding: Much Ado About Nothing?
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4): 673-689. 2019.
    Because idealizations frequently advance scientific understanding, many claim that falsehoods play an epistemic role. In this paper, we argue that these positions greatly overstate idealiza...
  •  306
    Social constructivism and the aims of science
    Social Epistemology 24 (1). 2010.
    In this essay, I provide normative guidelines for developing a philosophically interesting and plausible version of social constructivism as a philosophy of science, wherein science aims for social-epistemic values rather than for truth or empirical adequacy. This view is more plausible than the more radical constructivist claim that scientific facts are constructed. It is also more interesting than the modest constructivist claim that representations of such facts emerge in social contexts, as …Read more
  •  298
    This essay presents a fully inferentialist-expressivist account of scientific representation. In general, inferentialist approaches to scientific representation argue that the capacity of a model to represent a target system depends on inferences from models to target systems. Inferentialism is attractive because it makes the epistemic function of models central to their representational capacity. Prior inferentialist approaches to scientific representation, however, have depended on some repres…Read more
  •  284
    Understanding, Knowledge, and Scientific Antirealism
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 83 (1): 93-112. 2011.
    Epistemologists have recently debated whether understanding is a species of knowledge. However, because they have offered little in the way of a detailed analysis of understanding, they lack the resources to resolve this issue. In this paper, I propose that S understands why p if and only if S has the non-Gettierised true belief that p, and for some proposition q, S has the non-Gettierised true belief that q is the best available explanation of p, S can correctly explain p with q, and S can iden…Read more
  •  234
    Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi stud…Read more
  •  231
    Inaugurating Understanding or Repackaging Explanation?
    Philosophy of Science 79 (1): 15-37. 2012.
    Recently, several authors have argued that scientific understanding should be a new topic of philosophical research. In this article, I argue that the three most developed accounts of understanding--Grimm's, de Regt's, and de Regt and Dieks's--can be replaced by earlier accounts of scientific explanation without loss. Indeed, in some cases, such replacements have clear benefits.
  •  218
    Introduction
    In Insa Lawler, Kareem Khalifa & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences, Routledge. 2022.
    This chapter gives an overview of the various themes and issues discussed in the volume. It includes summaries of all chapters and places the contributions, some of which are part of a critical conversation format, in the context of the larger literature and debates.
  •  150
    Do the Social Sciences Vindicate Race's Reality?
    Philosophers' Imprint 21 (21). 2021.
    Many humanists and social scientists argue—if not assume—that race's centrality in social-scientific research provides an empirical justification for its reality as a constructed kind. In this paper, we first regiment these arguments, and then show that they face significant challenges. Specifically, race-concepts' social-scientific success is compatible with race being neither constructed nor real.
  •  147
    Default privilege and bad lots: Underconsideration and explanatory inference
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 24 (1). 2010.
    The underconsideration argument against inference to the best explanation and scientific realism holds that scientists are not warranted in inferring that the best theory is true, because scientists only ever conceive of a small handful of theories at one time, and as a result, they may not have considered a true theory. However, antirealists have not developed a detailed alternative account of why explanatory inference nevertheless appears so central to scientific practice. In this paper, I pro…Read more
  •  140
    General theories of explanation: buyer beware
    Synthese 190 (3): 379-396. 2013.
    We argue that there is no general theory of explanation that spans the sciences, mathematics, and ethics, etc. More specifically, there is no good reason to believe that substantive and domain-invariant constraints on explanatory information exist. Using Nickel (Noûs 44(2):305–328, 2010 ) as an exemplar of the contrary, generalist position, we first show that Nickel’s arguments rest on several ambiguities, and then show that even when these ambiguities are charitably corrected, Nickel’s defense …Read more
  •  133
    Sins of Inquiry: How to Criticize Scientific Pursuits
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 92 (C): 86-96. 2022.
    Criticism is a staple of the scientific enterprise and of the social epistemology of science. Philosophical discussions of criticism have traditionally focused on its roles in relation to objectivity, confirmation, and theory choice. However, attention to criticism and to criticizability should also inform our thinking about scientific pursuits: the allocation of resources with the aim of developing scientific tools and ideas. In this paper, we offer an account of scientific pursuitworthiness wh…Read more
  •  112
    Inquiry Tickets: Values, Pursuit, and Underdetermination
    Philosophy of Science 86 (5): 1016-1028. 2019.
    We offer a new account of the role of values in theory choice that captures a temporal dimension to the values themselves. We argue that non-epistemic values sometimes serve as “inquiry tickets,” justifying scientists’ pursuit of certain questions in the short run, while the answers to those questions mitigate transient underdetermination in the long run. Our account of inquiry tickets shows that the role of non-epistemic values need not be restricted to belief or acceptance in order to be relev…Read more
  •  107
    Is Verstehen Scientific Understanding?
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 49 (4): 282-306. 2019.
    Many have argued that the human sciences feature a unique form of understanding that is absent from the natural sciences. However, in the last decade or so, epistemologists and philosop...
  •  100
    Many have argued that unified theories ought to be pursued wherever possible. We deny this on the basis of social-epistemological and decision-theoretic considerations. Consequently, those seeking a more ubiquitous role for unification must either attend to the scientific community’s social structure in greater detail than has been the case, and/or radically revise their conception of unification.