Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Ways of subdividing my project

Lately, I've been thinking about how to pitch my project in a relatively succinct way. Here's a stab:

I basically have three questions that animate my research:
1) What is understanding? Here, I'm interested in a particular kind of understanding, as discussed in my previous post. My answer is basically that understanding is the ability to provide a good and correct explanation. This naturally leads to my second question...

2) What is explanation? This is really the question I've wrestled with the longest, and I'm savvy enough to know that it can be parsed in two important ways:

a) Suppose there are two propositions A and B. What must be their relationship in order for A to explain B? I call this a question about explanation simpliciter, and have offered my own account of it here. The core idea is this. There's been a long tradition of thinking of explanation as involving the fitting of an explanandum into a larger inferential network (Hempel & Kitcher are probably the most celebrated advocates of this view). The general problem with this is overpermissiveness: certain kinds of "inferential fittings" aren't explanatory (e.g. the flagpole and the shadow). My own view puts social and pragmatic constraints on this general "inferentialist" picture of explanation that block the pernicious cases. The interesting bit is that it achieves this in a seemingly non-ad-hoc way. Specifically, I begin with recent social‐psychological literature that explanations are accounts, i.e. social devices use to restore one’s social standing when charged with performing an objectionable action, and then treat the explanations that interest epistemologists and philosophers of science as a species of these accounts, specifically ones in which the objectionable actions are inferences (or better yet, "inferrings").

There are 2 things to note about this "accountabilist" model of explanation:
(i) it is broad, as would be required if one were to reduce understanding to explanation, as I have done, and
(ii) it is a social and pragmatic analysis of explanation.

As I noted above, there is a second way of interpreting the question, "What is an explanation?" This presupposes an answer to the question about explanation simpliciter:

b) Suppose that A1 explains B simpliciter, and A2 explains B simpliciter. Under what conditions would A1 be a better explanation of B than A2? I call this a question about explanatory goodness, and have not yet offered an account of it. I'd also like for this analysis to be social, pragmatic, and broad. The general idea is that explanation simpliciter is a social-epistemic practice, social epistemology provides us with some resources for evaluating good and bad social-epistemic practices, so good explanations lie at the intersection of these social-epistemological ideas and my account of explanation simpliciter.

Finally, there is a third question that I'm only starting to get clear about:
3) What is the value of explanation/understanding? Folks like Kvanvig and Pritchard have argued that understanding is distinctively valuable, and hint at times that it should supplant knowledge as the keystone to our inquiries. Part of their gambit involves segregating understanding from explanatory knowledge. Since I'm staunchly opposed to that kind of segregation, my challenge is to recoup some of the distinctively valuable aspects of understanding without making these capitulations. I have a faint sense that this can be done by forging a connection between the scientific realism and epistemic value debates. In short, if the kind of understanding cum explanatory knowledge that I'm developing plays a pivotal role in explaining the success of science, then I think we've discharged our responsibilities. I've gestured at these ideas elsewhere, but I'm eager to hammer out the details.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Thoughts on a book project

For the better part of two years, I've vacillated between writing a bunch of articles and just going for a book manuscript. Right now, I seem to have plenty of articles to write, but they're also starting to form the kind of "coherent whole" that would make for a nice book. So I figured that I'll just walk through the papers I'm writing or I want to write and assemble them into a tentative book project here.

My main questions in my recent papers concern the nature of a particular kind of understanding. Its paradigmatic incarnation is found within the natural sciences, though it's certainly not constrained to any particular discipline or even to distinctively academic enterprises. Some examples: Newton understood gravitation, Darwin understood why species were adapted to their environments and how they evolved, your mechanic understands why your car is making that funny noise, etc.

This has only recently become a hot topic among epistemologists and philosophers of science. My own view tends to be somewhat deflationary. Whereas some epistemologists (Kvanvig, Pritchard, Zagzebski) have claimed that understanding is not a species of knowledge, I've argued that it is a form of knowledge--specifically a kind of explanatory knowledge. While both epistemologists and philosophers of science (de Regt, Dieks, Kvanvig, Lipton) have argued that understanding isn't reducible to explanation, I've suggested the exact opposite. In the process, I've come up with an analysis of understanding.

So here's what I'm imagining for the book:
Chapter 1: I present my explanatory model of understanding.
Chapter 2: I argue that my model doesn't fall prey to J.D. Trout's worries about the unreliability of the sense of understanding.*
Chapter 3: I argue that Lipton's "Understanding Without Explanation" doesn't refute my model.**
Chapter 4: I argue that Kvanvig's objectual understanding can be reduced to my model.
Chapter 5: I argue that several philosophers of science have done nothing to show that understanding can't be replaced by explanation without loss.
Chapter 6: I argue that understanding is a species of knowledge.
Chapter 7: I argue that only an antirealist interpretation of my account of understanding could play the role that epistemologists like Kvanvig and Pritchard have imagined for it, and that it can do so while still remaining a species of knowledge.*

I'm practically there, with only the chapters (2&7) marked with an asterisk not yet started, and with the Lipton paper (marked with a double-asterisk) close to being ready. All the rest have more or less been written, so it's just an issue of putting them together into a coherent book. Since I don't see any of these being less than 20 pages, I think I've got enough for a short monograph.