I take it that something of the sort Kvanvig says about understanding is correct:
The central feature of understanding, it seems to me, is in the neighborhood of what internalist coherence theories say about justification. Understanding requires the grasping of explanatory and other coherence-making relationships in a large and comprehensive body of information. One can know many unrelated pieces of information, but understanding is achieved only when informational items are pieced together by the subject in question. [Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding: 192]
and
[U]nderstanding requires, and knowledge does not, an internal grasping or appreciation of how the various elements in a body of information are related to each other in terms of explanatory, logical, probabilistic, and other kinds of relations that coherentists have thought constitutive of justification. [ibid.: 192-3]
(My own view actually differs slightly from Kvanvig's in that I want to take understanding as fundamental and explain explanation in terms of it, rather than the other way around, but this is tangential to what I'm talking about here.) So, for example, someone who misunderstands evolutionary theory might think that humans evolved from chimpanzees, while someone who understands evolutionary theory will hold that both humans and chimps evolved from a common hominid ancestor. Broadly speaking then we might think that there are four states a person can be in: (i) understanding; (ii) misunderstanding; (iii) befuddlement (when a person's beliefs in a particular domain are largely incoherent); and (iv) simple non-understanding (when a person doesn't have any beliefs about a particular domain, coherent or otherwise). In this case, it seems that misunderstanding is a species of understanding: the person who beliefs that humans evolved from chimps grasps coherence-making relationships between a body of propositions. Now, a dissenter might just define understanding as the factive kind, but at the very least, misunderstanding shares all the distinctive features of understanding, while lacking factivity, and so the two are naturally grouped together as cognate phenomenon. If this is right, understanding is not a species of knowledge because truth is not a necessary condition for understanding.
How does what your saying differ from the following?
ReplyDeleteSuppose knowledge is justified true belief. Let us say that you know that p when you have a justified true belief that p, and you misknow that p when you have a justified false belief that p.
Slightly altered quotation from above: "it seems that misknowing is a species of knowing: the person who beliefs that humans evolved from chimps has a justified belief. Now, a dissenter might just define knowing as the factive kind, but at the very least, misknowing shares all the distinctive features of knowing, while lacking factivity, and so the two are naturally grouped together as cognate phenomenon."
Hi Kyle,
DeleteInteresting, although I'm not sure if this makes my view objectionable. I take it that false belief ("misbelief") is a species of belief; but pointing out that it is odd to talk about misknowing being a species of knowing wouldn't give me grounds to reject this.
I don't think this makes your view objectionable, but I think it undermines the reason that you give for thinking that understanding is non-factive. What I mean to say is: if what you say above gives us reason to think that understanding is non-factive, why does it not give us reason to think that knowledge is non-factive?
ReplyDeleteThe reason I give for thinking that understanding is non-factive, is that understanding consists in grasping coherence-making relationships between commitments (i.e. coherence-making relationships are characteristic of understanding) and that it is possible to grasp coherence-making relationships between commitments without those commitments being true. But this can't be straightforwardly transposed over to knowledge because what is characteristic of knowledge isn't coherence-making relationships, it's truth, belief, justification, anti-luck, or whatever.
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