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Virtue Epistemology Naturalized pp 329–345Cite as

Understanding as Knowledge of Causes

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Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 366))

Abstract

What happens when we move from knowing that something is the case to understanding why it is the case: e.g., from knowing that the eclipse occurred to understanding why it occurred? According to a long line of philosophers, the move from knowing that to understanding why is not the result of acquiring some sort of superknowledge but is rather simply the result of acquiring more knowledge: in particular, it is said, it is the result of acquiring a knowledge of causes. Although this is the traditional view of understanding, several recent philosophers have argued that it can no longer be sustained. According to Duncan Pritchard, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Catherine Elgin, for example, knowledge of causes is either not necessary for understanding, or not sufficient, or both. In this paper I consider some of the objections that have been made to the traditional view, and argue that what they show is not that the traditional view is mistaken, but rather that it needs to be understood in a particular way. More specifically, I argue that what the objections show is that the primary object of understanding is not a proposition or set of propositions, but rather the actual causal relationships (or, more broadly, modal relationships) that obtain in the world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Further contemporary support for the knowledge of causes view can be found in Salmon (1984, pp. 19–20), Miller (1987, p. 60), Woodward (2003), Strevens (2008), and Greco (2010, pp. 8–9, 2013).

  2. 2.

    See e.g. Kvanvig (2003, 2009) and Elgin (2004, 2009).

  3. 3.

    See e.g. Hempel and Paul (1965), Railton (1978), Achinstein (1983), Kitcher (1985), and Ruben (1992).

  4. 4.

    See e.g. Pritchard (2008, 2009, 2010) and Hills (2009, 2010).

  5. 5.

    On this way of looking at things, moreover, the appropriate way to “possess” a causal proposition of this sort would presumably be, not just by assenting to the proposition, but by assenting to it in a way that amounts to knowledge. Although one might mentally possess a causal proposition in some other way (say, by disbelieving, or by withhold judgment about it), supporters of the “knowledge of causes” view would obviously take this possession to be of the knowing kind. Although later we will return to the question of what this knowing might amount to, and whether something less than knowing might do, we can let this stand for now.

  6. 6.

    See Kim (2010 [1988], esp. pp 156–59). There Kim summarizes his point by claiming “We have also seen that explanatory realism entails the propositional account of explanatory knowledge” (Kim 2010 [1988], p. 158).

  7. 7.

    Unlike Pritchard’s, Kvanvig’s discussion of understanding focuses on cases of what he calls “objectual understanding” rather than on cases of “understanding why.” For more on his distinction, see Kvanvig (2003, ch. 8, 2009). The discussion below will eventually broaden out to include those cases as well.

  8. 8.

    I have adapted Pritchard’s first-person story to my own.

  9. 9.

    Especially if, as I will recommend in Sect. 7, we adopt an expansive notion of causation.

  10. 10.

    For example, Gareth Evans (1979), Saul Kripke (1980), and John Turri (2010) have argued that there can be a priori knowledge of contingent propositions. For critical discussion see BonJour (1998) and Casullo (2003).

  11. 11.

    For defenders of the idea that a priori knowledge is knowledge of necessary truths, see (among others) BonJour, Plantinga, Butcharov and others [Chisholm?].

  12. 12.

    See Chisholm and Plantinga.

  13. 13.

    Or, if it is hard to imagine that simple sums of this sort might simply be accepted on the word of another, substitute something more challenging: for instance, that the continuum hypothesis is independent of ordinary set theory (from Plantinga 1993, p. 106). And suppose I learn as well from the authority that this is a necessary truth, and I take that at face value. Here again I don’t have an instance of a priori knowledge, but I do have knowledge of a necessary truth (and knowledge that it is necessary, and so on).

  14. 14.

    Following Bruce Russell, by a necessary proposition I mean a proposition that cannot be false (Russell 2007).

  15. 15.

    Cf. Panayot Butchvarov: “While both necessary and contingent truths have fundamentally different objects, in both cases such objects are, in a very general sense, perceived” (Butchvarov 1970, p. 179).

  16. 16.

    Given our purposes here, it is also worth pointing out that BonJour’s position in this quote represents a conspicuous and deliberate change from his earlier 1998 book on the a priori. While in that book he essentially took for granted that propositions were the object of a priori knowledge, he subsequently (as in the 2005 article just quoted) came to believe that this was “a serious mistake” (BonJour 2001, p. 673, and again on p. 678). BonJour credits Paul Boghossian (2001) with helping him to see the shortcomings of the propositional view, because it was Boghossian who pointed that no amount of assenting to propositions about necessary facts could add up to a single act of a priori insight, a single apprehension of how the constituents of these facts were necessarily related. According to Boghossian, this is the lesson we should have learned from Lewis Carrol’s famous dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, where the Tortoise effectively notes that it is one thing to assent to the premises of an inference, and quite another to see or grasp how the conclusion follows from the premises. But once this fact is appreciated, BonJour came to think, we should give up the idea that a priori insight—at least in many cases—is directed at propositions at all. As he writes: “Moreover, once this possibility is appreciated, it becomes clear at once that at least many other a priori insights are also of this non-propositional sort. Consider the one involved in the color incompatibility case. What is most fundamentally grasped or apprehended there, I would now suggest, is the actual relation of incompatibility between the two colors, the way in which the presence of one excludes the presence of the other, with the propositional awareness that this is so, that nothing can be red and green all over at the same time, being again secondary and derivative. And something similar seems to me to be true in many, many other cases. Indeed, the question that arises, but which I will not try to answer here, is whether there are any cases where the most basic insight is propositional in form” (BonJour 2001, p. 677).

  17. 17.

    Or, perhaps, to a necessary proposition, along with the further information that it is necessary, etc.

  18. 18.

    Alternatively, one might say here “grasping or seeing, of certain properties (objects, entities), how they are necessarily related.”

  19. 19.

    Or again, one might say here “grasping or seeing, of certain properties (objects, entities), how they are modally related.”

  20. 20.

    Among other reasons that it seems best to say this is because otherwise a massive scepticism about understanding seems to threaten. Why, for example, think that the chemical story is sufficient for understanding? Why not insist that we go all the way down to basic physical properties? But if this is really required, much of the ordinary understanding we take ourselves to have would disappear.

  21. 21.

    This is not to deny the fallibility of whatever power of the mind it is that evaluates how things stand modally. One might therefore “see” or “grasp” (or seem to see or grasp?) modal relationships that do not obtain. It might therefore be better to say that the object of understanding in these cases, and perhaps in all cases, is our abstract representation of the relationships that we take to obtain in the world—as it were, our “mental model” of these relationships—so long as one recognizes a difference between abstract representations which take the form of models and those which take the form of propositions. For more on different ways of construing the object of understanding, see Grimm (2010) and Greco (2013).

  22. 22.

    For further defenses of the idea that the object of understanding is non-propositional, see Riggs (2003), Kvanvig (2003, p. 192), and Brewer (2009, pp. 298–99). Roberts and Wood (2007, pp. 46–47) claim that the object of understanding could be either propositional or nonpropositional, though when it comes to propositional understanding they seem to have in mind the sort of “semantic grasping”—the grasping of words or concepts—that is not our main focus here.

  23. 23.

    See, for example, Zagzebski (2001, pp. 241–43), Hills (2009, 2010, ch. 9), and Grimm (2010, 2012). De Regt and Dieks (2005), as well as de Regt (2009), argue for a more idiosyncratic version of the understanding as know how view, according to which someone who understands a theory “can recognize qualitatively characteristic consequences of T without performing exact calculations” (de Regt 2009, p. 33).

  24. 24.

    As noted earlier, for examples of those who favor non-causal explanations, see Hempel and Paul (1965), Railton (1978), Achinstein (1983), Kitcher (1985), and Ruben (1992). For some responses on behalf of the causal view, see Salmon (1984), Lewis (1986, pp. 221–24), and Woodward (2003, pp. 5–7).

  25. 25.

    For further discussion and examples, see Ruben (1992, ch. 7).

  26. 26.

    Greco likewise argues for a broad reading of the causal relation: “Understanding involves ‘grasping,’ ‘appreciating,’ or knowing causal relations taken in the broad sense: i.e., the sort of relations that ground explanation” (Greco 2010, p. 9; cf. Greco 2002).

  27. 27.

    Our modern notion of causation at least; Aristotle’s notion of causation was more expansive, along the lines developed here.

  28. 28.

    For another advocate of this approach, see Strevens: “I suggest that while the causal influence relation is one kind of raw metaphysical dependence relation that can serve as the basis of the difference-making relation, there are others as well, and that any of the difference-making relations so based is explanatory” (2008, pp. 178–79).

  29. 29.

    In addition to avoiding misleading connotations, such an approach would also make it easier to see cases such as Hills’s from Sect. 2—in which she claimed that the wrongness of eating meat supervened on, or depended upon, the suffering of the animals involved—as falling into the same category as more “overtly” causal cases such as Pritchard’s.

  30. 30.

    For concreteness, we can imagine that you are living in some sort of Orwellian regime, intent on falsifying the past, and that by chance you pick up the one accurate book not destroyed by the regime. In this and the following paragraph I am adapting the example developed by Kvanvig in his (2003, pp. 197–98).

  31. 31.

    As Kvanvig notes in his recent comment on his 2003 book: “In my book on the value of knowledge, I argued in favor of a conception of epistemology that gives strong place to what I termed “objectual understanding”…. I argued that such understanding was not explicable in terms of propositional knowledge, and thus does better than propositional knowledge in addressing a certain value problem about various epistemic states. It is this type of understanding that I want to argue here has special value” (Kvanvig 2013, pp. 1–2, typescript).

  32. 32.

    For Kvanvig’s “focus” test, see his (2003, p. 198) and (2009, pp. 98–99).

  33. 33.

    And again, I’m not sure it is, because Kvanvig’s “focus” test is not so clear to me.

  34. 34.

    Compare the view of Greco (2010) and Sosa (2011), on which what matters is not whether the ability was acquired by chance (think of the Swampman case), but rather whether the ability, however acquired, is reliably employed.

  35. 35.

    Thanks to Anne Baril, John Greco, Allan Hazlett, David Henderson, Mikael Janvid, Kareem Khalifa, Soazig Le Bihan, Bob Roberts, and Josh Thurow for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. Fordham University, Bronx, USA

    Stephen R. Grimm

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  1. Department of Philosophy, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Abrol Fairweather

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Grimm, S.R. (2014). Understanding as Knowledge of Causes. In: Fairweather, A. (eds) Virtue Epistemology Naturalized. Synthese Library, vol 366. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04672-3_19

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