Abstract
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.
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Notes
Opinion might well be divided as to whether the student has any grasp of effective population whatsoever. The recognition approach developed in this paper takes a liberal view; they do have a little, and in particular they have more than the many people who have never heard of effective population.
This case should be distinguished from one in which the student has mastered simple Newtonian physics, placing the passive third-law forces even in novel scenarios, but has no further explanatory story about the underpinnings of the passive forces, for example, no explanation of rigidity in solid objects. That, of course, was the situation of Newton himself. I am not claiming a deficit of grasp here.
Arguably, passive third-law forces are such a case: in a full-dress Newtonian physics, there are no passive forces; rather, all forces are consequences of force laws such as the law of gravity that implicitly conform to the third law of motion. The third law is thus to be understood not as a separate physical principle but as a constraint on force laws.
There is—perhaps needless to say—a strong connection between a recognition approach to grasp and various recognitional approaches to the nature of representation, running from causal covariance theories (Fodor 1990) to what Evans (1982) called “Russell’s principle”, the precept that in order to think about a thing, you must be able to distinguish it from other things.
Having multiple methods for recognizing an instance may, however, enhance accuracy, thereby augmenting grasp along the other dimension.
Likewise, according to the knowledge-based approach, grasp-constituting information is not limited to facts that have some recognitional use.
Understanding that term to refer, in such cases, to oxygen, as suggested by Kitcher (1993).
More carefully: in circumstances in which the terms of the theory refer and the statements framed using those terms are true.
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Acknowledgements
I have benefited greatly from the opportunity to present this material, in various incarnations, to audiences at the University of Michigan, New York University, the University of Oxford, Princeton University, and the online Understanding Working Group organized out of UCSD, and at the following events: “Explanation Across the Disciplines” at Middlebury College, “Understanding, in Science and Beyond” at the University of Iceland (online), the SURe IV conference at Fordham University, “Understanding Progress and Progress in Understanding” at the University of Iceland, and “Philosophy Meets Science” at NYU Shanghai. Thanks to Johann Frick for the case of the art forger, and to all of those who commented so perspicuously and so productively on my ideas.
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Strevens, M. Grasp and scientific understanding: a recognition account. Philos Stud 181, 741–762 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02121-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02121-x