Are Humans Intuitive Philosophers?

What are the criteria that people use to evaluate everyday explanations? This chapter focuses on simplicity, coherence, and unification. It considers various operationalizations of each construct within the context of explanations to measure how people respond to them. With regard to simplicity, some of the psychological literature suggests that people do have a preference for simple explanations that have few causes, but the authors find that a more complete assessment shows that this preference is moderated by a number of factors when evaluating everyday explanations. For one, people prefer explanations that elaborate on causal mechanisms and provide a greater sense of understanding, even if this increases complexity. Measures of coherence are highly predictive of explanation quality. Moreover, people prefer explanations that cohere with the evidence. But the meaning of coherence remains mysterious; it seems to be a placeholder for a complex system of evaluation. There is surprisingly little evidence that people value unification in the form of abstract explanation. Indeed, people often respond positively to extraneous detail. Detail may enhance our understanding of particular events and might help us better visualize mechanisms. The authors also find that people prefer explanations that use words entrenched in a community even if the explanation offers no real information. The authors conclude that people are not merely intuitive philosophers. How a person evaluates an explanation depends on what that person is trying to achieve.

Mechanistic versus Functional Understanding

Many natural and artificial entities can be predicted and explained both mechanistically, in term of parts and proximate causal processes, as well as functionally, in terms of functions and goals. Do these distinct “stances” or “modes of construal” support fundamentally different kinds of understanding? Based on recent work in epistemology and philosophy of science, as well as empirical evidence from cognitive and developmental psychology, this chapter argues for the “weak differentiation thesis”: the claim that mechanistic and functional understanding are distinct in that they involve importantly different objects. The chapter also considers more tentative arguments for the “strong differentiation thesis”: the claim that mechanistic and functional understanding involve different epistemic relationships between mind and world.

On Literary Understanding

Several recent approaches to literature—what the chapter describes as moral, aesthetic, and cognitive models of literary experience—allow us to consider its relevance in epistemic terms. Through an examination of the insights and limits of these approaches, the chapter presents the case for the experiential, generative, and expressive dimensions of understanding the literary work, and for their implications beyond literary reading. That literary understanding is experiential will mean that, beyond knowledge of what the text is about, one must have acquaintance with what it is like to undergo the imaginings prompted by the text. That literary understanding is generative means that what we understand in literary experience is not merely the objects or events in the world from which the work may draw, but how these are transformed in the specific literary presentation created by the work. That literary understanding is expressive will mean that the object of understanding issues from, and brings us into contact with, a point of view, even if one known only through and as the work itself. These dimensions of literary understanding, I suggest, enable understanding beyond the experience of literature as such.

Technology as Teacher

Robots are increasingly a part of children’s lives—teaching in classrooms, comforting children in hospitals, and playing in their homes. This chapter reviews literature on children’s understanding and trust of robots, including the authors’ own emerging research addressing these topics empirically. It demonstrates that children’s understanding of the abilities and behaviors of robots affects whether children like and are willing to learn from robots. The chapter emphasizes that children’s beliefs about the psychological, social, and perceptual abilities of robots change with age and differentially impact children’s feelings toward and their willingness to learn from them. Empirical research addressing these issues is in its infancy, so the chapter concludes with suggestions for still more programmatic research on the questions of how children learn from, and how they come to understand smart technology—computers, smartphones, and especially humanoid robots.

Perspectives and Frames in Pursuit of Ultimate Understanding

We frequently employ “framing devices,” like metaphors, telling details, and just-so stories, in ordinary conversation and in political, pedagogical, and scientific discourse, in order to coordinate our intuitive patterns of thinking about their subjects. Such framing devices, and the perspectives they generate, are thus tools for understanding at least in the sense of helping us to comprehend one another. But they can also seem like mere cognitive mechanisms: suitable for manipulating ourselves and one another, but at best heuristic proxies for, and at worst noisy obstacles to, genuinely rational engagement with the world. This chapter argues that frames can make an essential epistemic contribution within the course of inquiry, by guiding investigation in distinctively fruitful ways, and, ultimately, by producing characterizations that aptly reflect the explanatory structure of the world.

Religious Understanding and Cultured Practices

This chapter explores the insights and oversights of projection theories of religious belief (e.g., Feuerbach, Freud). It accepts the notion that religious beliefs are projections developed in religious practices applied to the “transcendent.” But these beliefs are not irrational simply because they originated as projections; this is the genetic fallacy. Rather, all beliefs about the transcendent, including denials of any reality to the transcendent, originate in projecting qualities found in the immanent onto the transcendent. The reasonableness of religious beliefs is argued on analogy with the travails of “A Square” in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. To distinguish among religious projections, the final section develops standards of appraisal that can be used at least to weed out the less plausible religious projects.

How Do Partial Understandings Work?

Most understandings are massively incomplete, raising questions about how they could be of any use. This in turn leads to questions about the typical contents of partial understandings and whether they suggest a different account of what understandings are and how they are used not just by laypeople but even by experts. Whether they are scientists or young children, all people work with partial understandings and usually fail to realize just how partial those understandings are. It is not possible for any one mind to store all the details necessary to completely understand many phenomena. Yet those gaps may be surprisingly functional, especially given ways that young children cope with overwhelming causal content. Our partial understandings work through heuristics that enable us to use what we do know to appropriately defer and lock onto knowledge in other minds. Early exposure to mechanisms may provide a route to more abstract causal understandings, such as a system’s causal complexity, that endure when mechanistic details fade from memory. These abstract understandings may guide deference. Illusions of understanding may also result in useful restraints on storing details that are not really necessary given access to knowledge in other minds.

Firsthand Knowledge and Understanding

This chapter aims to enhance our understanding of the notions of firsthand knowledge and of understanding, of how these are related, and of their importance in a flourishing human life. On certain questions of great human interest, firsthand knowledge and firsthand understanding are closely interrelated and have high priority. Such questions are often met in the humanities, broadly conceived to include not only appreciation of art, but also appreciation of sports, food, relationships, nature, and much more. And many such questions are to be found in philosophy. All such humanistic questions stand in contrast with practical questions where mere information suffices. What follows is devoted to explaining and defending these ideas.

Recasting the “Scientism” Debate

This chapter questions the idea that the sciences are by their nature limited in scope and contends that it rests on a failure to press the question of what we mean by “science.” This term and its cognates are approbative or honorific rather than purely descriptive: they have typically been used to mark whatever was thought at the time to be the best sort of theoretical knowledge. So it is not clear how any topic in the domain of theoretical knowledge can be judged to be beyond the scope of scientific illumination. Particular attention is paid to the history of debates about “scientism” and to the recently popular idea that consciousness and subjectivity are citadels that cannot be breached by natural science.

Toward a Theory of Understanding

This chapter proposes that understanding is the grasp of structure. The structure of an object gives it unity and lets us see it as a single object. When we grasp an object’s structure, we understand the object. Understanding must simplify what it grasps, and the larger and more complex the object of understanding, the more we must simplify and leave out of the phenomenon components that may be important at different times or for different purposes. The object of understanding can be anything that has structure: a living organism, an event, a narrative, a piece of music, a philosophical argument, a causal relation, a human intentional act, etc.