To understand why a phenomenon occurs, it is not enough to possess a correct explanation of the phenomenon: you must grasp the explanation. In this formulation, “grasp” is a placeholder, standing for the psychological or epistemic relation that connects a mind to the explanatory facts in such a way as to produce understanding. This paper proposes and defends an account of the “grasping” relation according to which grasp of a property (to take one example of the sort of entity that turns up in explanations) is a matter of recognitional ability: roughly, a property is grasped to the extent to which the would-be understander is capable of recognizing instances of the property.

要理解现象发生的原因，仅仅拥有对现象的正确解释是不够的：你必须掌握解释。在这个表述中，“掌握”是一个占位符，代表将思想与解释性事实联系起来以产生理解的心理或认知关系。本文提出并捍卫了一种对“掌握”关系的解释，根据这种关系，对一个属性的掌握（以解释中出现的实体类型为例）是一个识别能力的问题：粗略地说，一个属性被掌握到潜在理解者能够识别属性实例的程度。