Understanding is a protean concept in philosophy, and the desire forunderstanding is pervasive in everyday life. Scientists take it astheir goal to understand the world and how it works, teachers andparents hope to transmit understanding to their students and children,and from a political and social point of view we often strive formutual understanding.

This entry will look at some ways in which understanding has beenconceptualized by philosophers—especially epistemologists,philosophers of science, and philosophers of social science. The focuswill be on accounts of understanding the natural world and otherpeople, and it will only touch occasionally on accounts of what ittakes to understand other items, such as concepts, languages, ortexts.

• 1. Contexts
  • 1.1 Ancient Philosophy
  • 1.2 Epistemology & Philosophy of Science
• 2. Theoretical Frameworks
  • 2.1 Objects of Understanding
  • 2.2 Psychology of Understanding
  • 2.3 Normativity of Understanding
• 3. Special Issues in Epistemology
  • 3.1 The Epistemic Value of Understanding
  • 3.2 Testimony
• 4. Special Issues in the Philosophy of Science
  • 4.1 Explanation and Understanding
  • 4.2 Understanding and Idealization
• 5. Humanistic Understanding
  • 5.1 Perspective-taking and its Critics
  • 5.2 Understanding as an Ontological Category
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Contexts

The concept of understanding has been sometimes prominent, sometimesneglected, and sometimes viewed with suspicion, across a number ofdifferent areas of philosophy (for a partial overview, see Zagzebski2001). This section traces some of that background, beginning with theplace of understanding in Ancient Greek philosophy. It then considershow the topic of understanding was lost and then“recovered” in contemporary discussions in epistemologyand the philosophy of science.

1.1 Ancient Philosophy

The ancient Greek wordepisteme is at the root of ourcontemporary word “epistemology”, and among philosophersit has been common to translateepisteme simply as“knowledge” (see, e.g., Parry 2003 [2020]).

For the last several decades, however, a case has been made that“understanding” is a better translation ofepisteme. (For early influential arguments see, e.g.,Moravcsik 1979; Burnyeat 1980, 1981; Annas 1981.) To appreciate why,note that knowledge, as now commonly conceived, can apparently bequite easy to get. Thus it seems I can know a proposition such asthat it is raining outside just by opening my eyes. It alsoseems that items of knowledge can be in principle isolated oratomistic. I can therefore apparently know that it is raining whileknowing very little about other things, such as why it is raining, orwhat constitutes rain, or when it will stop.

Understanding seems to be different than knowledge in both respects.For one thing, understanding typically seems harder to acquire, andmore of an epistemic accomplishment, than knowledge (Pritchard 2010).For another, the objects of understanding seem more structured andinterconnected (Zagzebski 2019). Thus the subject matters we try tounderstand are often highly complex (quantum mechanics, the U.S. CivilWar), and even when we try to understand isolated events (such as thespilling of my coffee cup), we typically do so by drawing connectionswith other events (such as the jostling of the table by my knee).

With contrasts such as these in mind, it has seemed to severalscholars of Ancient philosophy thatepisteme has more incommon with what we would now call “understanding” thanwhat we would now call “knowledge”. Thus Julia Annas notesthat, for Plato, the person withepisteme has asystematic understanding of things, and is not a merepossessor of various truths (Annas 1981: ch. 10). Jonathan Learsimilarly claims that for Aristotle,

To haveepisteme one must not only know a thing, one mustalso grasp its cause or explanation. This is to understand it: to knowin a deep sense what it is and how it has come to be. (Lear 1988:6)

Granted, what Greek philosophers had in mind byepistemeoften does not fully align with our contemporary ideas aboutunderstanding, because in the hands of philosophers such as Plato andAristotleepisteme is an exceptionally high-grade epistemicaccomplishment. For Plato, fullepisteme seems to require agrasp of the basic elements of reality—in its most completeform, a grasp that traces back to the Form of the Good itself (Schwab2016, 2020; Moss 2020). For Aristotle, it seems to require anappreciation of the deductive relationships that allegedly holdbetween natures or first principles and observable phenomena (Burnyeat1981). In our contemporary use, by contrast, we often happily ascribeunderstanding to quite low-grade cases, where forms or firstprinciples do not seem to be grasped or even relevant—as when wetake ourselves to understand why the coffee cup spilled. Still, withits stress on systematicity and interconnectedness,epistemeplausibly has more in common with our contemporary conceptunderstanding than our contemporary conceptknowledge.

If an understanding-like state was of fundamental epistemic importanceto the Greeks, it is interesting to ask why the focus of epistemologyshifted over time, and why an interest in knowledge, especiallypropositional knowledge, came to predominate—including and maybeespecially quite isolated bits of propositional knowledge, such asthat I am sitting in front of a fire, orthat I have twohands.

Perhaps the shift occurred in response to the rise of scepticism inHellenistic philosophy (Burnyeat 1980: 188; cf. Zagzebski 2001: 236).Or perhaps the modern focus on propositional knowledge was a responseto the wars of religion in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe,where it became increasingly important to distinguish good knowledgeclaims from bad, even with respect to quite isolated claims. (For moreon the modern rise of interest in propositional knowledge, see Pasnau2010; 2017.) Regardless of why the shift occurred, a desire to grasp“how things hang together” undoubtedly remained a part ofthe human condition. It is therefore unsurprising that a move torevive understanding as a topic of philosophical inquiry eventuallyemerged.

1.2 Epistemology & Philosophy of Science

Although understanding as an epistemic good was largely neglected bymodern epistemologists in favor of theorizing about knowledge (orrelated epistemic properties, such as justification and rationality),it reappeared as a central object of concern at the end of thetwentieth century, for a few different reasons.

Catherine Elgin, for one, influentially argued that we cannot makesense of some of our greatest intellectual accomplishments, especiallythe accomplishments we associate with science and art, withoutappreciating the way they are often oriented not towards knowledge,but rather understanding (see especially Elgin 1991, 1996). From theperspective of virtue epistemology, Linda Zagzebski claimed that if wethink of an intellectual virtue as an “excellence of themind”, attuned to a variety of epistemic goods, then there issomething one-sided about focusing attention only on the good ofknowledge, while neglecting other highly prized goods such asunderstanding and wisdom (see especially Zagzebski 1996: 43–50;2001). Finally, Jonathan Kvanvig forcefully argued that whileunderstanding is distinctively valuable from an epistemic point ofview—i.e., more valuable than any of its proper parts, such astruth, or justification, or a combination of the two—knowledgeis not (Kvanvig 2003). For all these thinkers, the spotlight ofconcern within epistemology needed to be broadened so that goods suchas understanding could be given their proper due, and their claimsresonated with other epistemologists (for overviews, see Gordon 2017;Hannonforthcoming).

While the notion of understanding was often simply neglected inepistemology, in the philosophy of science it was for many yearsactively downplayed. A primary figure in this dynamic was Carl Hempel(see especially Hempel 1965). Although Hempel helped bring the notionof explanation back into respectability in the philosophy of science,he had significant reservations about tying explanation too closely tothe notion of understanding.

Part of this seemed to stem from the fact that the idea ofunderstanding that prevailed in his day was highly subjective andpsychological—it emphasized more a subjective“sense” of understanding, often tied to a felt sense offamiliarity. As Hempel notes, however, poor explanations might excelalong this dimension because they might

give the questioner a sense of having attained some understanding;they may resolve his perplexity and in this sense “answer”his question.

“But”, he continues,

however satisfactory these answers may be psychologically, they arenot adequate for the purposes of science, which, after all, isconcerned to develop a conception of the world that has a clear,logical bearing on our experience and is thus capable of objectivetest. (Hempel 1966: 47–48)

The goodness of an explanation therefore seems to have little obviousconnection to whether it manages to generate understanding in aparticular audience. A good explanation might do that. But then again,it might not. Patently poor explanations are also able to generate arich “sense” of understanding in some audiences (think ofconspiracy theorists), despite their shortcomings.

Philosophers such as Michael Friedman responded to Hempel’sconcerns by noting that simply because there seems to be apsychological element to understanding it does not follow thatunderstanding is merely subjective or up for grabs (Friedman 1974).After all, knowledge has a psychological element, in light of thebelief condition, but few hold that knowledge is merely subjective orup for grabs. Others, such as Jaegwon Kim, argued that leavingconsiderations about understanding out of accounts of explanation wasdeeply mistaken (Kim 1994 [2010]). After all, Kim claimed, we desireto explain thingsbecause we want to understand them.

Despite the efforts of Friedman, Kim, and others, significantreservations about the notion of understanding continued to linger inthe philosophy of science (see, for example, Trout 2002). A notableshift occurred with Henk de Regt’s distinction between the“feeling” or phenomenology of understanding and genuineunderstanding (de Regt 2004, 2009: ch. 1; cf. de Regt and Dieks 2005).In particular, he argued that the feeling is neither necessary norsufficient for genuine understanding. De Regt’s importantdistinction helped pave the way for a new surge of work on the topicover the last two decades, and helped philosophers move beyondthinking of understanding mainly in terms of felt“aha!” or “eureka!”experiences.

2. Theoretical Frameworks

As we look to particular accounts of understanding, it will help toconsider in turn:

1. understanding’s distinctive object (or objects),
2. its distinctive psychology, and
3. the distinctive sort of normative relationship that needs to holdbetween the psychology of the person who understands and the object ofhis or her understanding.

By way of comparison, consider the traditional “justified truebelief” analysis of knowledge. On this view, knowledge involvesa distinctive object (roughly, the truth, or a true proposition), adistinctive psychology (the psychological act of belief or assent),and a distinctive normative relationship that needs to hold betweenthe psychology of the believer and the thing believed (namely, thatone’s belief in the true proposition needs to be justified, insome sense).

What can be said, in a parallel way, about the elements ofunderstanding?

2.1 Objects of Understanding

At least at first glance, the objects of understanding appear to be sovaried that it is not obvious where one might find a common thread.Thus, we can understand fields of study, particular states of affairs,institutions, other people, and on and on(cf. Elgin1996: 123).

In line with the discussion in Ancient philosophy, and setting asidefor the moment special issues related to understanding other people(see Section 5), let us start with the generic view that the objectsof understanding are something like “connections” or“relations”. Following a distinction from Kim (1994[2010]), we can contrast two ways of thinking about these connectionsand relations—i.e., these plausible objects ofunderstanding.

According toexplanatory internalism, the connections orexplanatory relations one grasps are “logico-linguistic”relations that hold among a person’s beliefs or attitudes, ormore exactly the contents of those beliefs or attitudes (Kim 1994[2010]).What we grasp or see, when we understand somephenomenon, are how these various contents are logically orsemantically related to one another.

Kim argues that Hempel is a paradigm example of an explanatoryinternalist (Kim 1994 [2010]; cf. 1999 [2010]). For instance, supposethat one wants to explain and hence understand why a particular bar ofmetal began to rust (McCain 2016: ch. 9). A good Hempelian explanationwould be one in which a sentence describing the rusting followsinferentially from (a) a statement of the initial conditions (themoisture in the air, the constitution of the bar) and (b) a furtherlaw-like statement connecting the moisture, the constitution of thebar, and the onset of rust.

This Hempelian framework seems internalist because what you see orgrasp, when you understand the phenomenon, are connections among thepropositions you accept—more exactly, you see or grasp differentinferential or probabilistic connections among the contents of yourbeliefs that bear on the rusting. As Kim puts it:

the basic relation that generates an explanatory relation is alogico-linguistic one that connects descriptions of events, and thejob of formulating an explanation consists, it seems, in merelyre-arranging appropriate items in the body of propositions thatconstitute our total knowledge at a time. In explaining something,then, all action takes placewithin the epistemic system, onthe subjective side of the divide between knowledge and the realityknown, or between representation and the world represented. (Kim 1994[2010: 171–172])

Anexplanatory externalist by comparison holds that the basicconnections or relationship one grasps, when one understands, are notlogico-linguistic but metaphysical. What you grasp, when youunderstand why the metal began to rust, are not primarilyrelationships among your beliefs or their contents. Rather, youprimarily grasp real, mind-independent relationships that obtain inthe world.

Theorists who hold that the objects of understanding areinternal—i.e., logico-linguistic relations, the grasp of whichyields understanding—vary somewhat about which relations count.Although it seems clear in Hempel that the objects are inferentialrelationships of deductive and inductive support, epistemologistsoften appeal in a general way to relations ofcoherence. ThusCarter and Gordon write:

We think it is clear thatobjectual understanding—forexample, as one attains when one grasps the relevant coherence-makingrelations between propositions comprising some subject matter—isa particularly valuable epistemic good… Understanding widersubject matters will tend to be more cognitively demanding thanunderstanding narrow subject matters becausemorepropositions must be believed and their relations grasped. (Carter& Gordon 2014: 7–8)

Kvanvig likewise points to the importance of coherence:

Central to the notion of understanding are various coherence-likeelements: to have understanding is to grasp explanatory and conceptualconnections between various pieces of information involved in thesubject matter in question. Such language involves a subjectiveelement (the grasping or seeing of the connections in question) and amore objective, epistemic element. The more objective, epistemicelement is precisely the kind of element identified by coherentists ascentral to the notion of epistemic justification or rationality, asclarified, in particular, by Lehrer (1974), BonJour (1985) and Lycan(1988). (Kvanvig 2018: 699)

Other epistemologists similarly point to coherence relations as theobjects of understanding (e.g., Riggs 2003: 192). Since“coherence” is presumably a relation that holds among thecontents of beliefs, and not among items out there in the world, theseviews would qualify as internalist accounts of the objects ofunderstanding, according to the Kimean framework. (For furtherexamples and criticism, see Khalifa 2017a.)

For externalists about the object of understanding, especiallyconcerning phenomena “out there in the world”, theproposed objects vary. For instance, there is some support for theidea that the objects arenomic relations, or relationshipsaccording to which individual events and other phenomena are explainedby laws, and upper-level laws are explained by lower-level or morefundamental laws (Railton 1978). Another view is that the objects arecausal relations (Salmon 1984; Lipton 1991 [2004]), or moregenerallydependence relations (Kim 1974, 1994; Grimm 2014,2017; Greco 2014; Dellsén 2020), where causation is usuallytaken to be just one species of dependence.

A variation on the “dependence relationships” idea is thatthe objects of understanding are “possibility spaces” (cf.le Bihan 2017). Indeed, on the plausible assumption that dependence isan essentially modal notion—that is, fundamentally tied to ideasof possibility and necessity—dependence relations ineliminablygive rise to or generate possibility spaces. This is in keeping with asuggestion by Robert Nozick that

explanation locates something in actuality, showing its actualconnections with other things, whileunderstanding locates itin a network of possibility, showing the connections it would have toother nonactual things or processes. (Nozick 1981: 12; cf. Grimm2008)

Note that the distinction between internal and external explanationrelations is related to, but cross-cuts, another influentialdistinction by Wesley Salmon, between ontic and epistemic accounts ofexplanation (Salmon 1989; for discussion see Bechtel & Abrahamsen2005 and Craver 2014). Salmon’s distinction has come in forcriticism (see, e.g., Illari 2013; Bokulich 2016, 2018), because amongother things it is not clear why epistemic accounts should not beontic or world-involving; knowledge is an epistemic concept, afterall, but it is ontic or world-involving in virtue of the truthcondition. The distinction between explanatory internalism andexternalism plausibly avoids this concern.

Suppose in any case that the objects of understanding—theconnections or relations we grasp when we understand—are outthere in the world, and are not simply logico-linguistic items orelements of our psychology. According to a further importantdistinction from John Greco (2014), it does not follow that theselogico-linguistic/psychological items—or more generally thesemental representations—do not play a crucial role inour coming to understand, because the representations typically playthe role ofvehicles of understanding, even if they are notthemselves understanding’s object. More generally, Greco notes,it is important to distinguish between theobject ofunderstanding vs. thevehicle of understanding, i.e.,“between thething understood and itsrepresentation” (Greco 2014: 293).

Thus consider that a good map—say, of Midtown Manhattan—istypically a vehicle of understanding rather than an object ofunderstanding. When it is accurate, it allows the mind to grasp howthe streets and landmarks of Midtown are laid out, and to appreciatethe relationships they bear to one another. Or again, typically whenyou take a look at your car’s gas gauge and form the belief thatthe tank is half empty, the gauge is thevehicle by which youform your belief about the gas, but it is not theobject ofyour belief (see Dretske 1981). Assuming that the gauge is functioningproperly, the object of your belief is the gas itself, while the gaugeis simply the vehicle that represents the state of the gas to you.

(Of course, either the map or the gauge couldbecome anobject of understanding—one could think about how the streetsand landmarks are represented, e.g., the different colors or shapes orfonts the map uses to represent Midtown, or the length of thegauge—but this would be to “involve a representation of arepresentation” (Greco 2014: 293). And while the mind is capableof such an act, it represents an element of abstraction, and plausiblya departure from our usual way of engaging with the world.)

This distinction between objects and vehicles of understanding leavesopen the possibility that mental representations might not be the onlyvehicles of understanding, or the only way of latching on to realrelations in the world. Perhaps a person might come to understand theworld by first manually manipulating it, thus noting the possibilitiesthat it affords and how its different elements are connected (cf.Lipton 2009; Kuorikoski and Ylikoski 2015). This would be a way to“directly” grasp causal structure, a structure that couldthen—cognitively downstream, as it were—be represented bythe mind, perhaps in the form of mental maps, or “dependencemaps” (see Section 2.2).

Appreciating the contrast between vehicle of understanding and objectof understanding helps to reveal that in addition to pure internalistviews about the object of understanding (where the objects ofunderstanding are logico-linguistic relations), and pure externalistviews (where the objects are worldly), there are also possible hybridviews.

For instance, on the sort of view we find in Michael Strevens’sDepth (2008), what we grasp in the first instance arerelations that hold among the contents of our beliefs: relations ofdeductive entailment or coherence or probabilistic support. This viewis not simply internalist, however, because grasping theselogico-linguistic relationships, and in particular the relationshipsof deductive entailment, “mirror” the real relationshipsthat obtain in the world, and thus provide a vehicle for apprehendingthose relationships (Strevens 2008: 72). Thus Strevens holds that histheory is able to:

show how a deductive argument, or similar formal structure, canrepresent causal influence…. When a deductive argument is ofthe right sort to represent a causal process that has as a consequencethe state of affairs asserted to hold by the argument’sconclusion, I say that the argumentcausally entails theconclusion. A derivation that causally entails its conclusion, then,is one that can be used to represent (whether truly or not) a causalprocess that has the concluding state of affairs as its consequence.(Strevens 2012: 449)

On this view, by grasping or appreciating the necessitating force ofan entailment relation one thereby grasps or appreciates thenecessitating force of a causal relation—or, at least, somethingimportantly like it.

According to another hybrid approach, the internal logical orprobabilistic relationships do notmirror the relationshipsout there in the world, but ratherprovide evidence for theexistence of relationships out there in the world. Thus some hold thatwhen things go well an appreciation or grasp of the probabilisticconnections among the various things we believe allows us to infer theexistence of real causal connections in the world (seeSpirtes, Glymour, & Scheines 1993; Pearl 2000 [2009]). AsWesley Salmon characterizes an earlier version of this idea,

The explanatory significance of statistical relations is indirect.Their fundamental import lies in the fact… that they constituteevidence for causal relations. (Salmon 1984: 192)

Bearing in mind earlier distinctions, these would be accounts on whichone’s appreciation of statistical relations is the vehiclethrough which one grasps real (external) causal relations in theworld.

2.2 Psychology of Understanding

With respect to the psychology of understanding, recall that thepsychological element of propositional knowledge is typicallyconstrued in terms ofbelief, where belief is taken to be akind of assent or saying “Yes” to the content of theproposition. Thus to believe that the sky is blue is to assent to thepropositionthat the sky is blue; it is “taking it tobe true”that the sky is blue.

When we turn to understanding, by contrast, some have claimed that anew suite of cognitive abilities comes onto the scene, abilities thatwe did not find in ordinary cases of propositional knowledge. Inparticular, some philosophers claim that the kind of mental actionverbs that naturally come to the fore when we think aboutunderstanding—“grasping” and “seeing”,for example—evoke mental abilities “beyond belief”,i.e., beyond simple assent or taking-to-be-true (for an overview, seeBaumberger, Beisbart, & Brun 2017).

For instance, Elgin, de Regt, and Wilkenfeld argue that those whograsp how things are connected are able to cognitively“do” things that others cannot—they can apply theirunderstanding to new cases, for example, and draw new inferences.(See, for example, Elgin 1996: 122–24; de Regt 2004, 2017;Wilkenfeld 2013). Thus car mechanics who understand how engines workare able to make sense of engines that they have not encounteredbefore, and to anticipate how changes in one part of the engine willtypically lead (or fail to lead) to changes in other parts.

Grimm claims that the distinctive nature of these abilities flows fromthe distinctive nature of the objects of understanding (Grimm 2017).Suppose that the connections or relations one grasps are complexenough to constitute what we might call“structures”—structures with parts that depend uponone another in various ways. Arguably, for the mind to take up thesestructures in the right way, it is not enough simply to assent totheir existence. Rather, one needs to appreciate how the structure“works”, or how changes in its various parts will lead, orfail to lead, to changes in other parts.

For instance, suppose the structures to be grasped are represented by“causal maps” or “dependence maps”—mapswith nodes representing variables that can take on different valuesand thus represent directions of dependence (Gopnik & Glymour2002; Gopnik et al. 2004). In the schematic image below, from Gopniket al. (2004), the map represents a system in which changes to thevalue ofZ bring about changes to the value ofS,changes to the value ofS bring about changes to the values ofX andR, and so on.

According to Grimm (2017), a striking feature of these maps is thatthey are, as it were, “mobile” maps. That is, they arecognitive representations that by their very nature can adapt andchange as the variables represented by the map take on differentvalues. Put another way, they are “unsaturated” maps, inthe sense that they are characterized in terms of unsaturatedvariables that canbecome saturated by taking on differentvalues. What this means in terms of cognitive uptake is important,Grimm argues, because if the maps are mobile or unsaturated in thisway, then the mind that aptly takes them up must itself be mobile. Inparticular, the mind that takes up causal maps in a way that yieldsunderstanding must be able to anticipate how varying or adjusting thevalue of one of the variables will lead (or fail to lead) to changesin the values of the other variables (cf. Woodward 2003).

Relatedly, Alison Hills characterizes the distinctive psychologicalabilities that undergird understanding in terms of “cognitivecontrol” (Hills 2016). For example, Hills claims that in orderto understand why it is right to give money to charity, it is notenough to simply believe the propositionthat it is right to givemoney to charity because we owe assistance to the very needy(Hills 2016: 669), because I could accept a “because”claim along these lines on the basis of testimony while having only avery dim sense of how the two ingredient claims (that it is right togive money and we owe assistance to the very needy) are related. Whatis needed in addition is an appreciation of the relationship betweenthese two claims. And what this involves, according to the cognitivecontrol view, is an ability to “manipulate” the thingsstanding in relationship: for example, to be able to make a variety ofinferences in light of the relationship (Hills 2016: 663).

Although the views we have considered so far agree in thinking thatthere is “something special” from a psychological point ofview about understanding, other accounts claim that there is nothingparticularly special about understanding’s psychologicalprofile. More exactly, it is said that understanding does not appealto any special abilities or capacities that we do not find in ordinarycases of knowledge.

Emily Sullivan, for instance, claims that even if we grant thatunderstanding involves abilities, it does not follow that there issomething special about understanding from a psychological point ofview, because ordinary propositional knowledge itself requiresabilities (Sullivan 2018). Thus I can apparently only know that thetraffic light is red, in the actual world, if I would have gotten thecolor right in close possible worlds as well. More generally, knowingseems to require the ability to track the truth about the world, sothat when the world changes, my cognitive attitude about the worldchanges with it. But this ability to be responsive to changingconditions is not obviously anything exotic, and it does seem toentail that the object of the mind is not a proposition (that thetraffic light is red seems like a paradigm example of aproposition, after all).

Along the same lines, Kareem Khalifa claims that abilities areinvolved in understanding, but holds that they are “especiallyunspecial” (Khalifa 2017b: 56). For Khalifa, the modal characterof abilities is evident in normal scientific practice, because asscientists evaluate explanations on the basis of testing theynaturally rule out inadequate explanations and gravitate towardswell-supported ones. But evaluating and testing hypotheses in this waydoes not appear to require anything exotic or special from apsychological point of view, or to entail that the object ofunderstanding is not propositional.

Finally, psychologists themselves have increasingly focused oncharacterizing the cognitive profile of understanding. Thus TaniaLombrozo and colleagues have explored the question of why we seekunderstanding, and how activities such as offering explanations aid inthe acquisition and retention of understanding (Lombrozo, 2012;Williams & Lombrozo, 2010, 2013; Lombrozo & Wilkenfeld 2019).Psychologists have also explored the empirical question of how good(or bad) we are at identifying real relationships and dependencies inthe world. According to Frank Keil, for example, we are not good atthis at all, and we frequently fall prey to illusions of understanding(Keil 2006; cf. Ylikoski 2009). For instance, we often think weunderstand how a helicopter achieves lift, or how moving thepedals on a bicycle help to propel the bike forward.  But in bothcases, we are often well wide of the mark (Keil 2006; cf. Grimm 2009;Sloman & Fernbach 2017).

2.3 Normativity of Understanding

Suppose you accurately grasp that your house burned down because offaulty wiring. You do not think it burned down because of a lightningstrike, or a stray cigarette. Faulty wiring was the cause, and youaccurately grasp it as the cause (see Pritchard 2009, 2010 for moredetails on a case like this).

Is that all there is to understanding why your house burned down? Ordoes it also matter, for example,how one comes to grasp thisrelationship? These questions push us to ask about the normativedimension of understanding, and in particular to ask: Are there betterand worse ways to come by one’s grasp, and does this matter forthe acquisition of understanding? For example, are careful experimentsor good evidence needed? Or can one come by one’s grasp more orless by luck, and yet still in a way that generates understanding?

A parallel question with respect to knowledge would ask: Supposing youhave a true belief, is that all there is to knowledge? And here mostwould say “no”. In addition to the true belief,howyou came bythat true belief is also important. Is itbased on good evidence, or a reliable process, or a well-functioningdesign plan? When it comes to knowledge, these further normativequestions clearly matter. It is therefore not surprising that the samesorts of questions have been asked with respect to understanding.

While some argue that the normative profile of understanding isessentially the same as the normative profile of knowledge (Grimm2006; Khalifa 2013, 2017b; Greco 2014), others claim that they differin important ways, and especially with respect to the way in whichunderstanding, but not knowledge, seems compatible withluck.Among theorists who see a difference between knowledge andunderstanding here, we can distinguish those who claim thatunderstanding can befully externally lucky from those whothink it can only bepartly externally lucky.

A leading advocate of thefully externally lucky view isJonathan Kvanvig, who argues that how one comes by one’saccurate grasp matters—what we might call the“etiology” of the accurate grasp—but it does notmatter in all the same ways that we find in cases of knowledge (seeespecially Kvanvig 2003). In particular, it matters that the grasp wasacquired in a way that wasinternally appropriate(especially, in accord with the evidence in one’s possession),but it does not matter that the grasp wasexternallyappropriate—for example, that one came by one’sevidence in a reliable way. Thus Kvanvig argues:

What is distinctive about understanding has to do with the way inwhich an individual combines pieces of information into a unifiedbody. This point is not meant to imply that truth is not important forunderstanding, for we have noted already the factive character of bothknowledge and understanding. But once we move past its facticity, thegrasping of relations between items of information is central to thenature of understanding. By contrast, when we move past the facticityof knowledge, the central features involve non-accidental connectionsbetween mind and world. (Kvanvig 2003: 197)

For instance, suppose you read a history book full of inaccurate factsabout the Comanche dominance of the Southern Plains in the nineteenthcentury, but your dyslexia miraculously transforms them all intotruths (Kvanvig 2009). For Kvanvig, despite the one-in-a-billionluckiness of your grasp’s origins, you could nonetheless come toan understanding of this topic. So long as the accuracy and internalappropriateness conditions are satisfied, how you came by youraccurate grasp is not important.

Other philosophers have objected to Kvanvig’s account. On theirview, it is implausible to think you can come to understand the worldthrough sheer external luck, or (perhaps worse) through being thevictim of massive deception (Grimm 2006; Pritchard 2010; Khalifa2017b: ch. 7; Kelp 2021). Thus Pritchard claims that one needs toacquire one’s accurate grasp “in the right fashion”(Pritchard 2010: 108) or “in the right kind of way”(Pritchard 2010: 110)—in other words, by means of a reliablesource or method. One’s grasp therefore cannot be the result of“Gettier luck”—where, for instance, by sheer chancea story intended to deceive you happens to be right (Pritchard2010).

At the same time, philosophers such as Pritchard and Alison Hills holdthat understanding does toleratecertain kinds of luck, andin a way that propositional knowledge does not (Pritchard 2010; Hills2016). They therefore hold that understanding can be partlyexternally lucky. Thus imagine your environment is filled withmisleading information about some event—the fire that destroyedyour house, for example. Suppose that only SourceX will offeryou the truth about the fire—that faulty wiring was thecause—while all of the other sources will offer plausible butmistaken accounts. If you luckily rely on SourceX, that sourcecan enable you to understand why the event occurred, even though itcannot generate knowledge about why it occurred, due to the presenceof what Pritchard calls “environmental luck”. The upshot,on this view, is that while understanding is compatible withenvironmental luck, it is not compatible with Gettier luck. Theyconclude from this that since knowledge is compatible with neitherGettier luck nor environmental luck, understanding is not a species ofknowledge.

(For recent empirical studies regarding the compatibility of judgmentsof understanding with luck, and finding mixed support for thiscompatibility, see Wilkenfeld et al. 2018; Carter et al. 2019.)

Regarding the normative profile of understanding and its relation toknowledge, others have argued that understanding is not vulnerable todefeat, especially in the face of known counterevidence, in the waythat knowledge is (Hills 2016; Dellsén 2017). Dellsénfor instance argues that if I come to believe or grasp that a carengine works a certain way, and it really does work that way, then myunderstanding of how the engine works is secure even if I have(misleading) evidence that the person telling me about the engine isunreliable (Dellsén 2017). To these philosophers, this providesstill another reason for thinking that understanding is not a speciesof knowledge.

3. Special Issues in Epistemology

3.1 The Epistemic Value of Understanding

As part of what Wayne Riggs has called the “value turn inepistemology”, epistemologists have increasingly attempted toidentify the fundamental bearers of epistemic value (Riggs 2008). Froma purely epistemic point of view, is knowledge of just any sortvaluable? Or is the fundamentally valuable thing instead the abilityto provide reasons, or to possess beliefs that are in some way“Gettier proof”?

Into this mix some have argued that the really valuable things from anepistemic point of view are “higher grade” cognitiveaccomplishments, such as understanding or wisdom (Riggs 2003; cf.Baehr 2014). Thus by nature we do not seem to have any desire toacquire trivial pieces of information, such as the name of the 589thperson in the 1971 Dallas phone book. Butany instance ofunderstanding might seem worth pursuing or in some way worthwhile;thus Riggs writes,

it seems to me that any understanding, even of some subject matter wemay consider trivial or mundane, contributes to the epistemic value ofone’s life. (2003: 217)

Understanding might therefore be a better candidate for afundamentally valuable epistemic state than knowledge or truth.

Just why understanding might have this property is up for debate. Someproposals focus on the “internal” benefits thatunderstanding is alleged to provide. According to Zagzebski (2001),understanding has a kind of first-person transparency, tied to anability to articulate reasons, that we do not always find in cases ofknowledge. Thus to say a chicken-sexerknows the sex of aparticular chicken without being able to cite his or her grounds isone thing, but to say that someoneunderstands some subjectmatter—say, the U.S. Civil War—without being able toexplain it or to describe how the subject’s different elementsdepend upon and relate to one another seems like another, moreimplausible step (cf. Pritchard 2010). Understanding thereforearguably provides “a more natural home” (cf. Kvanvig 2003:1993) for internalist intuitions in epistemology than knowledge,because it seems to more naturally appeal to notions such astransparency, articulacy, and reason-giving than knowledge. (For theview that understanding too can be inarticulate, see Grimm 2017.)

Another view, from Pritchard (2009, 2010), is that any instance ofunderstanding is valuable because it counts as an achievement, andachievements are the kinds of things that are distinctively andfinally valuable. Instances of understanding count as achievements(and indeed what Pritchard callsstrong achievements) eitherbecause they involve overcoming an obstacle or because they bring tobear “significant cognitive ability”. For Pritchard,however, the same cannot be said for any instance of knowledge. Forexample, in many cases I might come to believe the truth on the basisof testimony, but the credit for my true belief seems to belong moreto the testifier than to me (cf. Lackey 2007). I do not reach thetruth on this question primarily because of my ability or skill, butbecause of the ability or skill of the testifier; such items ofknowledge therefore do not count as achievements, and hence lack finalvalue.

Against this, some have objected that there are many cases of“easy understanding” where no significant obstacle seemsto be involved, and no significant cognitive ability at play (e.g.,Lawler 2019). For instance, it seems I could come to understand why mytumble-dryer isn’t working—because it isunplugged—quite easily and without bringing to bear anyparticularly significant cognitive ability (Carter & Gordon 2014:5). It has therefore been claimed that not justany item ofunderstanding is valuable, and particularly not just any item of“understanding why”. Rather, only so-calledobjectualunderstanding is distinctively valuable, where objectualunderstanding is said to concern “wide” subject mattersthat involve “a large network of propositions and relationsbetween those propositions” (Carter & Gordon 2014: 8; cf.Khalifa 2017b: ch. 8).

A final proposal is that understanding is a better candidate for thegoal of inquiry than knowledge (Pritchard 2016; cf. Kvanvig2003: 202 and Kelp 2021). Suppose you learn from a reliable sourcethat the rising and falling of the tides are due to the moon’sgravitational pull. You will then apparently have knowledge of why thetides rise and fall, but according to Pritchard this knowledge willnot properly close your inquiry or satisfy your curiosity.

Indeed, one would expect our subject to continue asking questions ofher informant until she gains a proper explanatory grip on how causeand effect are related; mere knowledge of the cause will not suffice.(Pritchard 2016: 34)

On this view, an explanation of how cause and effect are related isessential to understanding why, and one’s inquiry will not reachits natural end until one resolves this question.

3.2 Testimony

A key issue in social epistemology is whether understanding, likeordinary propositional knowledge, can be transmittedviatestimony. Thus it seems that I can transmit my knowledge to you thatthe next train is arriving at 4:15, just by telling you. Transmittingunderstanding, however, does not seem to work so easily, if it ispossible at all. According to Myles Burnyeat,

Understanding is not transmissible in the same sense as knowledge is.It is not the case that in normal contexts of communication theexpression of understanding imparts understanding to one’shearer as the expression of knowledge can and often does impactunderstanding. (Burnyeat 1980: 186)

Thus a teacher might try to convey her understanding of some subjectmatter—say, of how Type II Diabetes works—but there is noguarantee that the understanding will in factbe transmitted,or that her students will come to see or grasp what she herself seesand grasps.

Supposing that understanding cannot be transmitted by testimony, thereare a few explanations for why this might be the case. For one,Zagzebski argues that the kind of “seeing” or“grasping” that seems integral to understanding issomething a person can only do “first hand”—itcannot be inherited from anyone else (Zagzebski 2008: ch. 6). Foranother, and according to Hills, if we agree that understanding is askill or ability, then understanding will be difficult or impossibleto transmit because skills and abilities in general are difficult orimpossible to transmit (Hills 2009, 2020). It is therefore a specificcase of a more general phenomena.

Others have argued that understanding is not, in fact, so difficult totransmit. Suppose I ask why you are late for our meeting, and you tellme “traffic”. It then seems like you have transmitted yourunderstanding to me quite directly—apparently just as directlyas when you communicate your knowledge to me that the next train iscoming at 4:15 (Grimm 2020). What seems required for successfultransmission of understanding is thus that the right conceptualscaffolding is in place, on the part of the recipient. But supposingthe scaffolding is in place, understanding can plausibly betransmitted in much the way knowledge can (Boyd 2017; cf. Malfatti2019, 2020). Others argue that since something like propositionalknowledge of causes entails at least a low degree of understanding, alow degree of understanding can be transmitted via testimony in thesame way as knowledge can (Hu 2019).

It has also been pointed out that even if we agree that seeing orgrasping needs to be first-hand, and that others cannot do this forme, the same “first-handedness” apparently holds forbelief. That is, no one else canbelieve for me, becausebelieving is a first-personal act (Hazlett forthcoming: sec. 2.3). Butjust as this fact about belief does not lead us to think thatpropositional knowledge cannot be transmitted, so too it should notlead us to think that understanding cannot be transmitted (Boyd2017).

In relation to moral testimony in particular, understanding has beeninvoked to explain why it often seems odd or “fishy” todefer to others about moral issues, such as whether eating meat ismorally wrong (for an overview, see Callahan 2020; cf. Riaz 2015). Oneexplanation of the fishiness is that the epistemic good we really wantwith respect to moral questions is not mere knowledge but ratherunderstanding. It is then said, for reasons tied to those justmentioned, that understanding cannot be easily (if at all) transmittedby testimony—either because it is an ability, and abilitiescannot easily be transmitted (Hills 2009, 2013, 2016) or becausegenuine understanding in moral matters involves a suite of emotionaland affective responses that cannot easily be transmitted by testimony(Callahan 2018). Deferring to moral testimony is therefore fishy, itis argued, because it does not get us the epistemic good we reallywant—moral understanding.

4. Special Issues in the Philosophy of Science

4.1 Explanation and Understanding

We seek explanations for an epistemic benefit, but how should we thinkabout that benefit? We noted above (Section 1.2) that philosopherssuch as Hempel have significant reservations about thinking about thebenefit in terms of understanding. As they point out, just as amistaken explanation can generate a “feeling” ofunderstanding in some people, so too an accurate explanation mightleave people cold.

In response to this concern, others note that the feeling ofunderstanding (or the phenomenology of understanding) should not beconfused with the epistemic state itself, any more than the feeling ofknowing should be confused with the epistemic state of knowledge (deRegt 2004, 2017). But even if this move is granted, and we think ofunderstanding as a full-bodied epistemic state and not a mere feeling,the relationship between explanation and understanding remainscontroversial.

According to what we might call an “understanding-first”approach to the relationship, thinking about the epistemology ofunderstanding is indispensable for thinking about what makes for agood explanation. More exactly, because we seem to assess the goodnessor badness of an explanation in terms of its ability to generateunderstanding, understanding is in some sense conceptually prior to,or more basic than, the notion of explanation. Thus intuitions aboutunderstanding are often taken to be diagnostic of the goodness (theexplanatoriness) of an explanation (Wilkenfeld 2013; cf. Wilkenfeld& Lombrozo 2020), and if we can think of a case where all of theconditions for the theory of explanation are met, but understandingdoes not result, that is a reason to reject the sufficiency of theconditions (see, e.g., Woodward 2003: 195, in diagnosingHempel’s view). Similarly, if we have understanding in ways notsanctioned by the theory, that is reason to think the conditions arenot necessary. More generally, an advocate of the“understanding-first” approach would likely concur withPaul Humphreys’s claim that:

Scientific understanding provides a far richer terrain than doesscientific explanation and the latter is best viewed as a vehicle tounderstanding, rather than an end in itself. (Humphreys 2000: 267; cf.Potochnik 2017: ch. 5)

Against understanding-first approaches, there are“debunking” approaches according to which understanding isof little if any help to accounts of explanation. (More positively,these might simply be considered “explanation-first”approaches.) Thus Khalifa argues that attempts to revive understandingas a central notion in the philosophy of science have amounted tolittle more than a repackaging of existing models of explanation(Khalifa 2012, 2017b: ch. 3), and that strictly speaking all one needsfor a plausible account of understanding is a plausible account ofwhat counts as a good or correct explanation, combined with aplausible account of knowledge. Understanding therefore amounts toknowing a correct explanation. But then nothing new orspecial is needed to theorize about understanding; our accounts ofexplanation and our theories of knowledge do all the importanttheoretical work (see especially Khalifa 2017b; cf. Kelp 2015).

Similarly, consider the following attempt, from Bradford Skow, tocharacterize the relationship between explanation andunderstanding:

SomethingE is an explanation of whyQ only ifsomeone who possessesE understands whyQ. (Skow2018: 214)

This condition on explanation cannot help us as theorists, Skowargues, because it is not even true. Thus suppose we construe“possessing” an explanation asknowing anexplanation. Plugged into the formula, the result is that one cannotknow an explanation of whyQ unless that knowledge constitutesan understanding of whyQ. But, plausibly, we can know anexplanation of whyQ without understanding whyQ. Forexample, someone can know why the litmus paper turnedred—because it was dipped in acid—without understandingwhy it turned red (Skow 2018: 215). This suggests it takesmore to understand why p than simply to know why p. In thecase of the litmus paper, Skow claims one also needs to appreciatehow the acid turns the paper red, orwhy it turns itred.

Opinions differ about the force of such examples. According to some,to require that understanding why p involves knowledge of mechanismsor deeper processes in this way would annihilate most of our everydayunderstanding (Grimm 2019a). Thus I can apparently understand why myeyes are watering—because I am chopping onions—withoutappreciating anything about the mechanism or connection that underliesthe watering. Others argue that there is indeed understanding in thesecases, although perhaps not a lot (Sliwa 2015).

4.2 Understanding and Idealization

A longstanding puzzle in the philosophy of science concerns howidealized models and representations (“idealizations”, forshort) allow cognitive access to the world. The puzzle is thatalthough idealizations seem to provide real epistemic benefits, thebenefits cannot apparently be identified with truth, because to theextent that they falsify or mispresent the world, idealizations oftenfail to reflect the truth. For example, idealizations often appeal toentities that do not and perhaps cannot exist—fully rationalagents, frictionless planes, etc. Or they subtract important worldlyelements from their accounts—e.g., long range inter-molecularforces.

Yet if idealizations provide epistemic benefits, and we cannot readilythink of the benefits in terms of truth, then how exactly should wethink about them? According to some philosophers, we should think notin terms of truth but rather in terms of understanding. Understandingis the epistemic benefit we receive from idealizations, andunderstanding and truth can come apart. On this view, understanding(unlike knowledge) can therefore be “non-factive” (Elgin2004, 2017; Potochnik 2017; cf. Sullivan & Khalifa 2019).

For instance, Elgin asks us to consider a paint sample we might see ina hardware store—say, of the shade jonquil yellow (Elgin 2017:187). While the sample might in fact be subtly different than theactual shade, and hence in that sense misrepresent it, it nonethelessseems to provide epistemic access to the shade. Idealizations such asthe Ideal Gas Law or Snell’s law work are then held to work in asimilar way. They represent not by mirroring but rather byexemplifying certain aspects of the target system, and via themechanism of exemplification enable understanding of the system (Elgin2017).

Others agree that idealizations enable scientists to understand theworld even though, strictly speaking, the idealizationsmisrepresent their target systems. According to Angela Potochnik(2017), this is because the systems studied by scientists areenormously complex networks of causal patterns and interactions.Particular interests and cognitive limitations will lead scientists tofocus on some of these causal patterns and neglect others, and theymight get those particular patterns right. In the process, however,they will misrepresent the actual messy complexity of the targetsystem, and the understanding of phenomena that results will therebybe non-factive.

For Strevens, idealizations enable understanding because they drawattention to the difference makers that bring about the thing to beexplained (Strevens 2017). More exactly, idealizations help us toappreciate the factors that make a difference to bringing about thephenomena we want to explain, and to identifying the factors that donot make a difference. The Ideal Gas Law helps us to understand theBoylean behavior of a gas, for example, even though the law imaginesthat there are zero long-range forces at work, because the existenceof those long-rage forces does not make a difference to the derivationof the Boylean behavior: they are insignificant enough that theirvalues can be set to zero without loss.

One difference between theorists such as Strevens and Potochnik maylie in the nature of the explanandum. For Potochnik, it seems clearthat the thing to be explained is a concrete, coarse-grainedphenomenon: the behavior of a gas in a container, for example. ForStrevens, it is a more abstract, fine-grained, and high-level event:the expansion of the gas. Thus for Strevens the thing to be explainedis something along the lines of:that the gas expanded, nothow it expanded. If one were to hold the explanandumconsistent, there might be notable agreement between these views(though see Potochnik 2016 for further discussion).

5. Humanistic Understanding

To this point we have mainly focused on what it takes to understandphenomena in the natural world, such as rusting metal bars, or therising and falling of the tides, or the behavior of gases. Alongstanding question, however, especially in the Continentaltradition of philosophy and especially in the philosophy of the socialsciences, is whether understanding human beings and their artifactsrequires something different and distinctive from an epistemic pointof view—perhaps, for example, a distinctive set of abilities ormethodologies, tied to the distinctive objects (or, importantly,subjects!) we are trying to understand.

Moreover, a long string of influential thinkers—starting roughlywith Giambattista Vico and continuing through figures such WilhelmDilthey and R. G. Collingwood—answer this questionaffirmatively. Distinctive abilities and perhaps methodologiesdo come on the scene when we try to understand human beings,at least when we try to understand them in a particular way. In broadstrokes, the idea is that there is a kind of understanding of otherhuman beings that we can only acquire by reconstructing theirperspectives—in some sense, “from within” thoseperspectives and according to their own terms (cf. Ismael 2018).

Sometimes this approach has been referred to as “theverstehen tradition”—in honor of its specialroots in the German tradition, and leaving untranslated the Germanword for understanding (Martin 2000; Feest 2010). Alternative labelsfor this approach include “the interpretative tradition”,“the historicist tradition”, “the hermeneutictradition”, and “the humanistic tradition” (foroverviews, see Hiley et al. 1992; Stueber 2012). For convenience, wewill refer to this as “thehumanistictradition”.It is not an essential part of this tradition that human beings canonly be understood by reconstructing their perspectives, butthe tradition does characteristically claim that there is specialvalue in trying to do so. It also typically claims that taking upperspectives “from within” requires distinctive cognitiveresources and perhaps distinctive methods—resources and methodsthat are not clearly needed when we attempt to understand naturalphenomena.

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was among the first to try toarticulate how exactly understanding human beings differs fromunderstanding the natural world (see especially Vico 1725 [2002].)According to Vico, just as we have a specialscienza(knowledge or understanding) of things we have made or producedourselves, so too we can have special insight into things that otherhuman beings have made or produced—where the things made orproduced included not just physical artifacts but also human actions.Vico further postulated a special ability—fantasia, orreconstructive imagination—by which we can enter into the mindsof others and see the world through their eyes and in terms of theircategories of thought (Miller 1993: ch. 5).

Further north in Europe, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803)held that because human nature is not static, or fixed irrespective oftime and place, understanding alien cultures requires a process ofEinfühlung—a “feeling one’s wayinto”—the culture in question, in all its specificity andperhaps with an eye to its particular genius. In Herder’s hands,however,Einfühlung was not a quasi-mystical orirrational attempt to leap into the minds of others. Instead, it wasoften a slow, methodical process that needed to be aided by carefulhistorical-philological inquiry (Forster 2002: xvii). (For centraltexts, see Herder 2002.)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Wilhelm Dilthey(1833–1911) became the most celebrated advocate of the idea thatthe human sciences—in German, theGeisteswissenschaften, such as history—had a differentfocus than the natural sciences, and centered on the idea of inner orlived experience. (See Dilthey 1883 [1989] for acharacteristic work.) Someone’s lived experience, moreover, wasconstituted not only by their beliefs or attitudes, but also by theiremotions and volitions. For Dilthey, as Frederick Beiser puts theidea,

We understand an episode in a person’s life only when we see howit plays a role in realizing his basic values, his conception of whatmakes life worth living. (Beiser 2011: 334)

In England, the humanistic approach was championed especially by R. G.Collingwood (1889–1943). According to Collingwood, whatdistinguishes human history from, say, geological history, is thathuman history is suffused with thought—i.e., it is a record ofhuman aspirations, goals, beliefs, frustrations, and so on. We can,moreover, have two possible stances towards these thoughts. We can tryto map them from a third person point of view, and identify thevarious ways the thoughts depend upon and relate to one another. Butwe can also try to “re-enact” or “rethink”them (D’Oro 2000, 2004). Thus Collingwood held that,

The events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectaclesfor contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, butthrough, to discern the thought within them. (Collingwood 1946 [1993:214])

5.1 Perspective-taking and its Critics

A central tenet of the humanistic tradition is that when an agent hasa first-person perspective on the world, there is value in trying to“take up” or “assume” that perspective, ratherthan simply trying to map that agent’s perspective from adetached, third-person perspective. Abraham Lincoln for instance,could presumably be understood from a third-person, detachedperspective by a psychologist adept at mapping the various ways inwhich Lincoln’s beliefs and desires, hopes and fears, seemed todepend upon and relate to one another. What the humanistic traditionsays is that even if the psychologist were to do this exquisitely, sothat all of these relationships were accurately plotted, there wouldstill be an important sort of understanding missing—anunderstanding of what it was like to be Lincoln from the inside, or toregard the world as he regarded it, at least in part.

Philosophers differ about the epistemic value of this project ofperspective-taking. Thus some claim that there are certainfacts that only show up from a first-person point of view(Nagel 1974), and hence can only be apprehended from that point ofview. For instance, if I want to apprehend facts about “what itis like” to experience the world from your perspective, Iarguably need to try to place myself, somehow, in that perspective.Others claim that certainconcepts only show up for us from afirst-personal, engaged perspective. For instance, perhaps the conceptof chronic pain can only be acquired by someone who has experiencedit, or the concept of romantic love, or racial bigotry. A related viewis that while these concepts can perhaps beacquired withoutthe relevant first-person experience, they cannot be adequatelygrasped or mastered without that experience. As Stephen Turnerwrites:

When a mother tells her 13 year old daughter that she does not knowwhat “love” is, she is not making a comment aboutsemantics; she is pointing to the nonlinguistic experientialconditions that are bound up with the understanding of the term thatthe daughter does not share. (Turner 2019: 254)

The thought here seems to be that while the daughter might have theconcept of love, her grasp of the concept will be extremely poorwithout the benefit of the first-person experience, and her attemptsto apply it will be unreliable.

In fields such as anthropology, ethnography, and sociology, and in thephilosophical areas that reflect on these disciplines (primarily, thephilosophy of social science), questions related to the epistemicvalue of perspective-taking gave rise to debates about whether it isnecessary to immerse oneself in a society in order to understand itadequately. According to some, the answer is “yes”: if Iwant to understand a society or culture, I need to understand it fromthe participants’ perspective, with special sensitivity to theconcepts and rules that guide the participants’ perspective,even if only implicitly (see especially Winch 1958, 1964). It is thensometimes claimed that one can only really grasp or master theseconcepts by participating in the relevant form of life. As theethnographer James Spradley writes:

Immersion is the time-honored strategy used by most ethnographers. Bycutting oneself off from other interests and concerns, by listening toinformants hours on end, by participating in the cultural scene, andby allowing one’s mental life to be taken over by the newculture, themes [the implicit beliefs of a culture] often emerge… This type of immersion will often reveal new relationshipsamong domains and bring to light cultural themes you cannot discoverany other way. (Spradley 1980: 145; cf. Kampa 2019)

Another view is that immersion, while perhaps helpful, is not strictlynecessary. What is necessary is recognizing the priority of theparticipants’ perspective, and using that perspective tocharacterize the activities that need to be understood in the firstplace (Taylor 1971; McCarthy 1973). If we want to make sense of whatlooks like (say) voting or praying in another culture, we need toadopt that culture’s way of identifying what counts as voting orpraying (which perhaps will turn out to be a distinct but closelyrelated activity, such as voting* or praying*). Carving up thebehavior according to ourown categories will onlymisrepresent what is happening and lead to misunderstanding.

Peter Winch, among others, further argues that it is hard orimpossible to try to adopt another culture’s way of carving upthe world without somehow taking that culture on board in a holisticway, because it is hard or impossible to characterize particular bitsof behavior in isolation (Winch 1958). To make sense of what amedieval knight means by praying (or praying*), for example, I mightneed to connect this with other concepts (perhaps such as honor, orduty, or salvation) that again might be quite different than my own.The result might then be that one gradually acquires what AlasdairMacIntyre calls a “second first language”, as one’sgrasp of the relationships between different concepts and theirapplications increases (MacIntyre 1988: ch. 19).

Against the push for perspective-taking as a source of understanding,especially in the social sciences, at least three strains of criticismarose: Positivist, Critical, and Gadamerian.

The Positivist critique—associated with thinkers such asTheodore Abel (1948), Ernest Nagel (1953), and Richard Rudner(1966)—had a number of prongs. For one thing, there were gravedoubts about the reliability of the processes associated withperspective taking. After all, it seems all too easy to projectone’s own cares and concerns onto the minds of others. It wasalso argued that reliving experiences, to the extent that this ispossible, does not actually amount to an explanation of why theexperiences happened. I could, after all, have lived through a seriesof events myself, but not been able to explain or understandthem—so why should imaginatively living through someoneelse’s experiences, to the extent this is possible,automatically grant me understanding? (For an overview of theseobjections, see Martin 2000; Fay 2016; Beiser 2019.)

Critical Theorists have argued that the first-person perspective isnot the most theoretically or politically important perspective,because it often masks deeper and more significant sources of behavior(see Warnke 2019). The deeper sources might include an agent’sown, unacknowledged motivations, or they might include thepresuppositions, power dynamics, and economic conditions of thesociety that shaped the possibility spaces in which the agent moves.It is thus what happens “behind the back” of the subjectthat is often crucial for truly understanding behavior—thehidden impulses and power dynamics and systems of oppression that areoften obscured from the perspective of the agent, sometimes in anunacknowledged way by the agent herself. (Here we also findinfluential Marxist and Feminist analyses and critiques. See Alcoff2005; Warnke 2014.) A hybrid view, from Habermas, is that we needto be able to shift back and forth between the subject’sperspective and the structural perspective, if we are to properlyunderstand the reality of social life (Habermas 1981 [1984/1987]; foran overview, see Baynes 2016).

The Gadamerian critique, finally, is that we can never fully jumpoutside of our own cares and concerns in order to adopt the cares andconcerns of others. Reliving or re-experiencing— in the sense oftransposing ourselvesout of our framework andintothe framework of other agents or cultures—is thus an impossibleideal. Instead, we always take our frameworks with us (Gadamer 1960[1989]). For Gadamer, what understanding others—and especiallytheir written or spoken words—requires is not transposingourselves into their worldviews, but trying to fuse our worldviews insome way (Horizontverschmelzung). Perhaps, for example, myconception of voting or prayer will become enlarged or modified byengaging with the conceptions I find in other cultures, and perhapsespecially through a dialogue with the texts of those cultures.Whether this fusion essentially amounts to a project of translation(from one worldview to another), or something else is a matter fordebate. (See Vessey 2009 for an overview.)

5.2 Understanding as an Ontological Category

An additional question, especially in the Continental tradition, iswhether we should think of understanding primarily in epistemic terms.Perhaps it is better to think of understanding as anontological category—a way of being in theworld—rather than an epistemic one (for an overview, seeFehér 2016).

According to Heidegger’s influential account, for instance,understanding is not a cognitive act that we might or might notperform. Rather, it is our fundamental way of living in the world, andwe are “always already” engaged in understanding. Thus hewrites that:

Understanding is not an acquaintance derived from knowledge, but aprimordially existential kind of being, which, more than anythingelse, makes such knowledge and acquaintance possible (123–4;trans. by Wrathall 2013).

Just as Descartes spoke of himself as ares cogitans—athinking thing—so for Heidegger we are, fundamentally,understanding things. As Gadamer elaborates the Heideggerian idea:

Understanding is… the original form of the realization ofDasein, which is being-in-the-world. Before any differentiation ofunderstanding into the various directions of pragmatic or theoreticalinterest, understanding is Dasein’s mode of being. (Gadamer 1960[1989: 259])

One central element of this view is that we are always projectingpossibilities onto the world around us. Or rather, it is not as if theworld first presents itself as a bare thing empty of possibilities,and then we construe it as possessing these possibilities; instead,our experience of the world is from the first suffused with this senseof possibility. To take an example that Samantha Matherne (2019) usesto illustrate Heidegger’s view: when I first apprehend themartini in front of me, I take it as offering a variety ofpossibilities—to be sipped, to be thrown, to be shaken, to bestirred. If I then take the martini as to be sipped, I am seizing onone of these possibilities and interpreting the martini in light ofthis specific possibility. But my experience of the drink was neverdevoid of an apprehension of possibilities altogether.

A further question is why, on the Heideggerian framework, the state ofprojecting possibilities does not count as epistemic ortruth-evaluable, even if we allow that it is also in some senseontological. After all, the possibilities that we project onto theworld might not be genuine or grounded in reality. As Grimm (2008)notes, someone might think that apparently solid things (likebaseballs) could not possibly pass through other apparently solidthings (like tables), but learning about quantum tunneling might callthis into question, and transform one’s sense of possibility.There thus seem to be facts about the possibilities that the worldaffords, and it seems like a mind could either track these factsaccurately, or not. But this appears to be a topic of interest notjust to ontologists or metaphysicians, but to epistemologists as well(cf. Westphal 1999).

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Other Internet Resources

• Gordon, Emma C., 2017, “Understanding in Epistemology”,The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the following for helpful comments and conversationsregarding previous versions of this entry: Laura Callahan, Henk deRegt, Catherine Elgin, John Greco, Crina Gschwandtner, Michael Hannon,Xingming Hu, Tania Lombrozo, Federica Malfatti, Kevin McCain, KeithMcPartland, Soazig le Bihan, Angela Potochnik, Constantine Sandis,Armin Schulz, Whitney Schwab, Bhavya Sharma, Brad Skow, MichaelStrevens, Karsten Stueber, Emily Sullivan, Daryl Tress, Rene vanWoudenberg, Daniel Wilkenfeld, and Bryan Williams. Special thanks toKareem Khalifa for careful discussion of the final version.