Grasp and Scientific Understanding
Philosophical Studies, 181:741–762, 2024
Abstract:
To understand why a phenomenon occurs, it is not enough to possess a
correct explanation of the phenomenon: you must grasp the explanation.
In this formulation, grasp
is a placeholder, standing for the psychological
or epistemic relation that connects a mind to the explanatory facts in such
a way as to produce understanding. This paper proposes and defends an
account of the grasping
relation according to which grasp of a property
(to take one example of the sort of entity that turns up in explanations) is a
matter of recognitional ability: roughly, a property is grasped to the extent
to which the would-be understander is capable of recognizing instances of
the property.
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