The explanation versus understanding debate was important to the philosophy of thesocial sciences from the time of Dilthey and Weber through the work of Popper and Hempel.

This article locates Bourdieu’s sociology within the lasting controversy concerning the nature of causal explanation and interpretative understanding in the social sciences, with a special focus on the classical problem surrounding the alleged compatibility between these procedures. First, it is argued that Bourdieu’s praxeological and relational perspective on the social universe leads him not only to join the ‘compatibility field’ of the debate, but to sustain, more radically, the identity between explanation and understanding. Second, the article (...) defends the view that this methodological proposal is tied to a distinction often ignored among the commentators of Bourdieu’s oeuvre, namely that between objectivism, a mode of knowledge of the social which he intends to integrate and overcome in his structural praxeology, and determinism, adopted by the author as a fundamental scientific principle and, at the same time, a potentially emancipatory ethico-political tool bequeathed by his reflexive sociology. While basically sympathetic to Bourdieu’s perspective, the article concludes in a more critical vein, by defending the need to bridge the gap between the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ that marks his portrayal of the reflexive capabilities of the lay agent, on the one hand, and the ‘optimism of the will’ infused in the critical program of reflexive sociology, on the other. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to put Ricœur’s philosophy in dialogue with human geography. There are at least two good reasons to do so. The first concerns the epistemological foundation of geography: Whereas humanistic or phenomenological geographers inspired by Heidegger or, to a lesser extent, by Merleau-Ponty have sometimes taken on an anti-scientific approach, the Ricœurian articulation of understanding and explanation may contribute to building a bridge between the experiential side of place-meanings and the scientific explanations of (...) spatial elements and their relationships. The second reason has to do with the application of the Ricœurian “model of the text” to landscape: It is a direction that Ricœur never explicitly took, but it is worth exploring, especially considering that “landscape as a text” was quite a popular metaphor among human geographers in the 1980s and 1990s. In this paper I will discuss both issues in order to outline a “Ricœurian path to geography,” which, while never explicitly developed by the philosopher, may represent an innovative and fruitful actualization of his thought. (shrink)

The explanation versus understanding debate was important to the philosophy of the social sciences from the time of Dilthey and Weber through the work of Popper and Hempel. In recent years, with the development of interpretive approaches in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and language analysis, the problematic has become absolutely central. The broad literature to which it has given rise, while still split along "analytic" versus "continental" lines, shows increasing signs of a reunification in philosophy. G. H. von Wright's important (...) book, Explanation and Understanding, originally published in 1971, is a good example of this trend.In Understanding and Explanation, Karl-Otto Apel takes von Wright's work as a point of departure for a rigorous, penetrating analysis of the issues involved. After reviewing the failure of earlier discussions to resolve these issues, Apel develops his own approach in light of the turn from logico-semantic to pragmatic analysis of language in post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. In doing so, he constructs bridges that reach back to themes and positions of the German tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, but from strikingly new angles.Karl-Otto Apel holds the chair for social philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. His book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

Starting with the slogan that understanding is a ‘knowledge of causes’, Stephen Grimm and John Greco have argued that understanding comes from a knowledge of dependence relations. Grounding is the trendiest dependence relation on the market, and if Grimm and Greco are correct, then instances of grounding should also give rise to understanding. In this paper, I will show that this prediction is correct – grounding does indeed generate understanding in just the way that Grimm and (...) Greco anticipate. However, grounding examples of understanding also show that Grimm and Greco are not telling the full story when it comes to understanding. Understanding can only be generated by a particular subset of dependence relations – those dependence relations that are also explanatory. Grimm and Greco should thus appeal to a privileged class of dependence relations, relations like grounding that can also give rise to explanation. (shrink)

I propose and defend the hypothesis that understanding is the norm of explanation. On this proposal, an explanation should express understanding. I call this the understanding account of explanation. The understanding account is supported by social and introspective observations. It is also supported by the relationship between knowledge and understanding, on the one hand, and assertion and explanation, on the other.

Abstract This essay will argue systematically and from a historical perspective that there is something to be said for the traditional claim that the human and natural sciences are distinct epistemic practices. Yet, in light of recent developments in contemporary philosophy of science, one has to be rather careful in utilizing the distinction between understanding and explanation for this purpose. One can only recognize the epistemic distinctiveness of the human sciences by recognizing the epistemic centrality of reenactive empathy (...) for our understanding of rational agency, that is, by emphasizing the psychological component in the concept of understanding that nineteenth-century philosophers like Droysen, in contrast to twentieth-century hermeneutic philosophers, still acknowledged. In addition, the essay will show in detail that merely pointing to the fact that narratives have a cognitive function in the domain of the human sciences, as is common among philosophers of history, does not provide us with a sufficient demarcation criterion for distinguishing between the human and natural sciences. (shrink)

There is a recent interest within both philosophy of science as well as within epistemology to provide a defensible account of understanding. In the present article I build on insights from previous work in attempt to provide an account of two related forms of understanding in terms of the ability to form rational intentions when using specific types of mental representations. I propose first that “understanding that X” requires that one form a representation of X and, further, (...) that one must be capable of forming rational intentions using this representation across a range of conceivable conditions. I then propose that “understanding why X” requires that one possess a representation of a successful explanation for why X, and that one must be similarly capable of forming rational intentions using this representation across a range of conceivable conditions. I conclude the manuscript by reviewing objections and considering the way this account relates to other literature on explanation and understanding. (shrink)

Scientific understanding, this paper argues, can be analyzed entirely in terms of a mental act of “grasping” and a notion of explanation. To understand why a phenomenon occurs is to grasp a correct explanation of the phenomenon. To understand a scientific theory is to be able to construct, or at least to grasp, a range of potential explanations in which that theory accounts for other phenomena. There is no route to scientific understanding, then, that does not (...) go by way of scientific explanation. (shrink)

The field of health promotions faces considerable ethical and programmatic challenge – and we believe opportunity – in addressing the relative normativity of the concept(s) of health and its professional handling. To date, distinctions of objective and subjective indicants of “health” have fostered normative tension(s) within the utilitarian ethics of health promotions, which we opine to be anathema to the ultimate goal(s) of attaining and sustaining healthy individuals and societies. Objective and subjective metrics and values should be reconciled, as reciprocal (...) and complementary on both idiosyncratic and systemic levels. In this light, we propose that a philosophical and ethical approach, based primarily upon Schmitz’s New Phenomenology and its specific understanding of subjectivity could afford epistemological bases for non-normative engagement of health promotion within a structural–functional framework of ethics. We dialectically address its potential benefit, limitations and value for health promotion and health care ethics and present an approach which points towards a more substantial encouragement of diversity through the legitimation of subjectivity. (shrink)

There are immense differences in the social sciences both as regards what is to be explained and how it is to be explained. I make an initial distinction between the understanding, construed roughly as acquiring a grasp of the generative mechanisms and structures at work in the world, natural and social, and explanation, which I construe as causal. I clarify several candidates for the objects of explanation and reject the idea that the “explanation of behavior”—if that (...) means the acts of concrete situated persons—is ever the proper object of explanation. Critical to my account is the idea of a typical actor, created for purposes of explanation. I conclude by applying this analysis to the explanation of crime. (shrink)

It is instructive to view the scientific revolution from the point of view of Robert Boyle’s distinction between intermediate and ultimate causes. From this point of view, the scientific revolution involved the identification of intermediate causes and their investigation by way of experiment as opposed to the specification of ultimate causes of the kind involved in the corpuscular matter theories of the mechanical philosophers. The merits of this point of view are explored in this paper by focussing on the hydrostatics (...) of Pascal and Boyle, understood as the experimental investigation of the action of the intermediate causes weight and pressure. The distinctive features of this new science are highlighted by comparing it with two alternative versions of hydrostatics, that of Stevin and that of Descartes. (shrink)

In considering the Cambridge School of intellectual history, we should distinguish Skinner's conventionalism from Pocock's contextualism whilst recognising that both of them argue that the study of a text's linguistic context is at least necessary and perhaps sufficient to ensure understanding. This paper suggests that although "study the linguistic context of an utterance" is a valuable heuristic maxim, it is not a prerequisite of understanding that one does so. Hence, we might shift our attention from the role of (...) linguistic contexts in understanding a text, to the role of ideational contexts in our explanations of meanings or beliefs. The explanatory role of contexts can be unpacked in terms of traditions and dilemmas. Here the paper also considers how this approach differs from that of the Cambridge School. (shrink)

Anthropology, the science of human culture, includes in its scope the anthropology of scientific cultures. Anthropological accounts of these scientific cultures -- which also happen to be the cultures to which most anthropologists belong -- are scarcely adequate. All too often science is assimilated to the practices and thought systems of non-scientific cultures; some anthropologists espousing the anti-scientific methods of symbol analysis and relativism. Arguments of M. Douglas, C. Geertz and F. Hanson are used as critical illustrations.

In this paper, I outline a heuristic for thinking about the relation between explanation and understanding that can be used to capture various levels of “intimacy”, between them. I argue that the level of complexity in the structure of explanation is inversely proportional to the level of intimacy between explanation and understanding, i.e. the more complexity the less intimacy. I further argue that the level of complexity in the structure of explanation also affects the (...) explanatory depth in a similar way to intimacy between explanation and understanding, i.e. the less complexity the greater explanatory depth and vice versa. (shrink)

In 1747, James Lind carried out an experiment which proved the usefulness of citrus fruit as a cure for scurvy. Nonetheless, he rejected the earlier hypothesis of Bachstrom that the absence of fresh fruit and vegetables was the only cause of the disease. I explain why it was rational for James Lind not to accept Bachstrom’s explanation. I argue that it was the urge for scientific understanding that guided Lind in his rejection and in the development of his (...) alternative theory that humidity was the primary cause of the disease. Central in this process was the search for causal mechanisms which could provide understanding of how the disease developed and which fitted in with the knowledge of the time. Given that the relevant background knowledge and statistical methods were not yet available to Lind, he was right to prefer his own explanation to that of Bachstrom. Although his explanation turned out to be wrong, and Bachstrom’s right, from a historical point of view it offered deeper causal understanding of both the development of the disease and the preventive and curative effects of fresh vegetable food. This case study illustrates how the search for causal mechanisms can not only be enlightening, but also very misleading. (shrink)

(1988). Understanding, truth, and explanation. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 19-34. doi: 10.1080/02698598808573322.

This paper attempts to show that scientific explanation relies not only on theoretical representation but also on scientific understanding. It introduces a distinction between ‘embodied' and ‘reflective' understanding and argues that both forms of understanding have an important role to play in the constitution of any scientific practise. Other significant features of a scientific practice are the act of explanation and interpretation. Thus, the paper claims that scientists' ability to produce scientific explanations and interpretations rests (...) on both representational and non-representational knowledge. (shrink)

Scientists and laypeople alike use the sense of understanding that an explanation conveys as a cue to good or correct explanation. Although the occurrence of this sense or feeling of understanding is neither necessary nor sufficient for good explanation, it does drive judgments of the plausibility and, ultimately, the acceptability, of an explanation. This paper presents evidence that the sense of understanding is in part the routine consequence of two well-documented biases in cognitive (...) psychology: overconfidence and hindsight. In light of the prevalence of counterfeit understanding in the history of science, I argue that many forms of cognitive achievement do not involve a sense of understanding, and that only the truth or accuracy of an explanation make the sense of understanding a valid cue to genuine understanding. (shrink)

I Two Traditions. Scientific inquiry, seen in a very broad perspective, may be said to present two main aspects. One is the ascertaining and discovery of ...

The aim of this article is to elucidate the notions of explanation and mechanism, in particular of the social kind. A mechanism is defined as what makes a concrete system tick, and it is argued that to propose an explanation proper is to exhibit a lawful mechanism. The so-called covering law model is shown to exhibit only the logical aspect of explanation: it just subsumes particulars under universals. A full or mechanismic explanation involves mechanismic law statements, (...) not purely descriptive ones such as functional relations and rate equations. Many examples from the natural, biosocial, and social sciences are examined. In particular, macro-micro-micro-macro social relations are shown to explain other wise puzzling macro-macro links. The last part of the article relates the author's progress, over half a century, toward understanding mechanism and explanation. (shrink)

The paper describes and defends an eclectic approach to narrative explanation in history and social sciences (as well as in natural history). The view of narrative explanation defended allows combinations of several recent ideas concerning the nature of narrative explanation.The guiding idea is that the explanatory power of narratives consists in their capacity to accommodate various forms of explanations and interpretations. Narrative explanations are seen as theories abouthappenings that may consist of diverse forms of explanations, interpretations and (...) explanation sketches. There is no single form of narrative explanation, rather narrative is seen as a form tor synthesizing various explanations.Several problems concerning explanation and narrative are discussed with relation to the proposed approach: laws in explanations, literary or fictional aspects of narratives, relativism, constructivism and noncognitivism or antirealism. Hayden White’s theory of the explanatory role of “emplotment” is discussed and criticized.The upshot is that the eclectic approach defended does not face any problems unique to it: problems faced are general epistemological problem. The literary aspects of historical narrative are interpreted as normative and rhetorical, making the relevance of these aspects tor narrative explanation depend on the question whether there are legitimate moral explanations. (shrink)

We introduce and discuss a knowledge-driven distillation approach to explaining black-box models by means of two kinds of interpretable models. The first is perceptron (or threshold) connectives, which enrich knowledge representation languages such as Description Logics with linear operators that serve as a bridge between statistical learning and logical reasoning. The second is Trepan Reloaded, an ap- proach that builds post-hoc explanations of black-box classifiers in the form of decision trees enhanced by domain knowledge. Our aim is, firstly, to target (...) a model-agnostic distillation approach exemplified with these two frameworks, secondly, to study how these two frameworks interact on a theoretical level, and, thirdly, to investigate use-cases in ML and AI in a comparative manner. Specifically, we envision that user-studies will help determine human understandability of explanations generated using these two frameworks. (shrink)

Philosophers of science since Nagel have been interested in the links between intertheoretic reduction and explanation, understanding and other forms of epistemic progress. Although intertheoretic reduction is widely agreed to occur in pure mathematics as well as empirical science, the relationship between reduction and explanation in the mathematical setting has rarely been investigated in a similarly serious way. This paper examines an important particular case: the reduction of arithmetic to set theory. I claim that the reduction is (...) unexplanatory. In defense of this claim, I offer evidence from mathematical practice, and I respond to contrary suggestions due to Steinhart, Maddy, Kitcher and Quine. I then show how, even if set-theoretic reductions are generally not explanatory, set theory can nevertheless serve as a legitimate foundation for mathematics. Finally, some implications of my thesis for philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science are discussed. In particular, I suggest that some reductions in mathematics are probably explanatory, and I propose that differing standards of theory acceptance might account for the apparent lack of unexplanatory reductions in the empirical sciences. (shrink)

Aristotle thinks that we understand something when we know its causes. According to Aristotle but contrary to most recent approaches, causation and explanation cannot be understood separately. Aristotle complicates matters by claiming that there are four causes, which have come to be known as the formal, material, final, and efficient causes. To understand Aristotelian causation and its relationship to explanation, then, we must come to a precise understanding of the four causes, and how they are supposed to (...) be explanatory. Aristotle’s discussion of the causes, however, is compact, and he typically presents them without arguing for them. He thus leaves us with a number of questions, ranging from the highly specific to the highly general. One question in particular has captured the attention of scholars and philosophers over the last century, and it has had a strong influence on recent treatments of the four causes – namely, whether we are right to understand Aristotle as committed to a plurality of kinds of causation, or rather a plurality of kinds of explanation. Sometimes the question is raised as one of whether it would be more accurate to speak of the four ‘becauses’ rather than the four ‘causes’. This worry is highly general, and there are in fact several ways in which it might be formulated; nonetheless, it is important to clarify the precise nature of the problem, and the possible ways of responding to it. At issue is not just whether Aristotle’s notions are sufficiently like the modern notion of causation to be relevant to our concerns, but, more importantly, whether the distinctions he draws are ultimately metaphysical or epistemological in character. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the usefulness of the Machamer, Darden, and Craver (2000) mechanism approach to gaining an understanding of explanation in cognitive neuroscience. We argue that although the mechanism approach can capture many aspects of explanation in cognitive neuroscience, it cannot capture everything. In particular, it cannot completely capture all aspects of the content and significance of mental representations or the evaluative features constitutive of psychopathology.

本书从理解与解释的本体论、认识论和方法论三个层次的关系中理解科学解释,解释自然科学与人文、社会科学解释的辨证关系;探讨了科学解释的可能性条件,回答了科学解释何以可能的问题;阐释了科学文本的概念,拓展了 定律解释的标准模式等。.