Kênio Estrela

This paper examines the epistemic status of understanding and argues that it cannot be adequately reduced to propositional knowledge or to justified true belief. The analysis challenges strictly truth-centered accounts of cognition and defends a conception of understanding grounded in structured interpretive engagement with representational systems. Drawing on recent debates in epistemology and philosophy of science that distinguish understanding from knowledge (e.g., Kvanvig 2003; Grimm 2006; de Regt 2017), the paper situates understanding as a distinct epistemic achievement with its own normative profile, irreducible to belief or information possession. It is argued that scientific models, literary fictions, and contemporary AI-mediated representations systematically rely on idealized or non-literal structures that nonetheless yield genuine epistemic gains. The central claim is that understanding arises through norm-governed practices of interpretation and use, rather than through the mere accumulation of accurate propositions. Scientific models contribute to understanding by isolating explanatory dependencies, fictional narratives afford experiential, perspectival, and meaning-structuring insight, and AI systems support human understanding by facilitating linguistically mediated exploratory and interpretive activities. In each case, departures from literal truth function as epistemically productive constraints rather than as defects. By articulating a unified framework that accounts for these practices, the paper clarifies the relationship between understanding and knowledge and defends the legitimacy of fictional and idealized representations as indispensable components of human sense-making and cognition.

Holism is a well-known and discussed theory in several fields of philosophy, especially in the field of epistemology and the philosophy of language. Willard Van Orman Quine was one of the leading analytical philosophers to argue about this topic in the last 70 years. The objective of this paper is to present how Quine developed his holistic arguments, identifying the texts in which they appear, and finally to present our interpretation of how epistemological holism and meaning holism work in the perspective of this so important American analytical philosopher, based on a new argumentation presented by Cañamares (2002).