Works by Wilkenfeld, Daniel A. (exact spelling)

22 found
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  1. Understanding as representation manipulability.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):997-1016.
    Claims pertaining to understanding are made in a variety of contexts and ways. As a result, few in the philosophical literature have made an attempt to precisely characterize the state that is y understanding x. This paper builds an account that does just that. The account is motivated by two main observations. First, understanding x is somehow related to being able to manipulate x. Second, understanding is a mental phenomenon, and so what manipulations are required to be an understander must (...)
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  2. Understanding as compression.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (10):2807-2831.
    What is understanding? My goal in this paper is to lay out a new approach to this question and clarify how that approach deals with certain issues. The claim is that understanding is a matter of compressing information about the understood so that it can be mentally useful. On this account, understanding amounts to having a representational kernel and the ability to use it to generate the information one needs regarding the target phenomenon. I argue that this ambitious new account (...)
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  3. MUDdy understanding.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2017 - Synthese 194 (4).
    This paper focuses on two questions: Is understanding intimately bound up with accurately representing the world? Is understanding intimately bound up with downstream abilities? We will argue that the answer to both these questions is “yes”, and for the same reason-both accuracy and ability are important elements of orthogonal evaluative criteria along which understanding can be assessed. More precisely, we will argue that representational-accuracy and intelligibility are good-making features of a state of understanding. Interestingly, both evaluative claims have been defended (...)
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  4. Functional explaining: a new approach to the philosophy of explanation.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2014 - Synthese 191 (14):3367-3391.
    In this paper, I argue that explanations just ARE those sorts of things that, under the right circumstances and in the right sort of way, bring about understanding. This raises the question of why such a seemingly simple account of explanation, if correct, would not have been identified and agreed upon decades ago. The answer is that only recently has it been made possible to analyze explanation in terms of understanding without the risk of collapsing both to merely phenomenological states. (...)
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  5. Depth and deference: When and why we attribute understanding.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld, Dillon Plunkett & Tania Lombrozo - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (2):373-393.
    Four experiments investigate the folk concept of “understanding,” in particular when and why it is deployed differently from the concept of knowledge. We argue for the positions that people have higher demands with respect to explanatory depth when it comes to attributing understanding, and that this is true, in part, because understanding attributions play a functional role in identifying experts who should be heeded with respect to the general field in question. These claims are supported by our findings that people (...)
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  6. Objectually Understanding Informed Consent.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy 62 (1):33-56.
    Analytic Philosophy, Volume 62, Issue 1, Page 33-56, March 2021.
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  7.  89
    Folk attributions of understanding: Is there a role for epistemic luck?Daniel A. Wilkenfeld, Dillon Plunkett & Tania Lombrozo - 2018 - Episteme 15 (1):24-49.
    As a strategy for exploring the relationship between understanding and knowledge, we consider whether epistemic luck – which is typically thought to undermine knowledge – undermines understanding. Questions about the etiology of understanding have also been at the heart of recent theoretical debates within epistemology. Kvanvig (2003) put forward the argument that there could be lucky understanding and produced an example that he deemed persuasive. Grimm (2006) responded with a case that, he argued, demonstrated that there could not be lucky (...)
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  8.  63
    Explanation classification depends on understanding: extending the epistemic side-effect effect.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld & Tania Lombrozo - 2020 - Synthese 197 (6):2565-2592.
    Our goal in this paper is to experimentally investigate whether folk conceptions of explanation are psychologistic. In particular, are people more likely to classify speech acts as explanations when they cause understanding in their recipient? The empirical evidence that we present suggests this is so. Using the side-effect effect as a marker of mental state ascriptions, we argue that lay judgments of explanatory status are mediated by judgments of a speaker’s and/or audience’s mental states. First, we show that attributions of (...)
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  9.  93
    Ethical Concerns with Applied Behavior Analysis for Autism Spectrum "Disorder".Daniel A. Wilkenfeld & Allison M. McCarthy - 2020 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 30 (1):31-69.
    This paper has both theoretical and practical ambitions. The theoretical ambitions are to explore what would constitute both effective and ethical treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder.1 However, the practical ambition is perhaps more important: we argue that a dominant form of Applied Behavior Analysis, which is widely taken to be far-and-away the best “treatment”2 for ASD, manifests systematic violations of the fundamental tenets of bioethics. Moreover, the supposed benefits of the treatment not only fail to mitigate these violations, but they (...)
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  10. Understanding beyond grasping propositions: A discussion of chess and fish.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld & Jennifer K. Hellmann - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 48:46-51.
    In this paper, we argue that, contra Strevens (2013), understanding in the sciences is sometimes partially constituted by the possession of abilities; hence, it is not (in such cases) exhausted by the understander’s bearing a particular psychological or epistemic relationship to some set of structured propositions. Specifically, the case will be made that one does not really understand why a modeled phenomenon occurred unless one has the ability to actually work through (meaning run and grasp at each step) a model (...)
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  11.  16
    Diagrams, images and conceptual maps in nursing education.Christine Durmis & Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2023 - Nursing Philosophy 24 (3):e12441.
    The way in which one understands information and concepts, and the way a student works to develop this, is an individual aspect of learning that cannot be universally defined as (at least manifested) the same for everyone. ‘Understanding’ is a broad term, and the way one achieves understanding is dependent on the way that material is presented. In this article, we argue that the philosophy of science can be important to nursing education—in particular, by showing that the way we imbue (...)
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  12.  18
    When law and ethics come apart: Constraints versus guidance.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld & Christine Durmis - 2022 - Nursing Ethics 29 (6):1430-1440.
    The generally agreed upon principle that legality and ethics can come apart is frequently overlooked in our professional ethics education and decision-making procedures. The crux of the issue is that we teach in our philosophy classes that the law can sometimes be unethical, but then clearly state in nursing codes of ethics that students should always follow the law. The law could no doubt give us some reason to choose action A over action B, but in professional contexts we frequently (...)
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  13.  78
    Modeling Authenticity.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2016 - Res Philosophica 93 (1):245-268.
    In this paper, we explore the link between understanding and transformative decisions. Paul (2014) suggests that one important aspect of making some decisions is that we make them not just on the basis of what data from other people tell us, but based on our own acquaintance with how the decision affects us. In this paper, we draw out a parallel between the sort of reasoning that Paul argues is required for authentic decision making and the sort of epistemic grasp (...)
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  14.  55
    Moral understanding and moral illusions.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (1):25-33.
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  15.  57
    In Defense of Vaccine Mandates: An Argument from Consent Rights.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld & Christa M. Johnson - 2022 - Public Health Ethics 15 (1):27-40.
    This article will focus on the ethical issues of vaccine mandates and stake claim to the relatively extreme position that outright requirements for people to receive the vaccine are ethically correct at both the governmental and institutional levels. One novel strategy employed here will be to argue that deontological considerations pertaining to consent rights cut as much in favor of mandating vaccines as against them. The presumption seems to be that arguments from consent speak semi-definitively against forcing people to inject (...)
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  16.  13
    Understanding Necessarily and Understanding Actually.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2023 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (2):287-303.
    In this paper, I consider the relationship between coming to understand why something must be the case and coming to understand why it actually is the case in some particular instance. Peter Lipton uses the possibility of coming to understand a phenomenon via a necessity proof as an argument that there can be understanding with no explanation. Lipton’s argument has come under criticism, at least partially because one might think that understanding why something must be the case has a different (...)
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  17.  16
    What are We Asking Patients to Do? A Critical Ethical Review of the Limits of Patient Self-Advocacy in the Oncology Setting.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld & Teresa Hagan Thomas - 2022 - The New Bioethics 29 (2):181-190.
    Increasing emphasis on patient self-management, including having patients advocate for their needs and priorities, is generally a good thing, but it is not always wanted or attainable by patients. The aim of this critical ethical review is to deepen the current discourse in patient self-advocacy by exposing various situations in which patients struggle to self-advocate. Using examples from oncology patient populations, we disambiguate different notions of self-advocacy and then present limits to the more demanding varieties (i.e., health-related, trust-based, and psychological); (...)
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  18.  22
    Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science.Richard Samuels & Daniel A. Wilkenfeld (eds.) - 2019 - London: Bloomsbury.
    This volume gathers together leading philosophers of science and cognitive scientists from around the world to provide one of the first book-length studies of this important and emerging field. Specific topics considered include learning and the nature of scientific knowledge, the cognitive consequences of exposure to explanations, climate change, and mechanistic reasoning and abstraction. Chapters explore how experimental methods can be applied to questions about the nature of science and show how to fruitfully theorize about the nature and role of (...)
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  19.  28
    Living with Autism: Quus-ing in a Plus-ers World.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2020 - Res Philosophica 97 (1):53-68.
    In this paper, I explore the possibility that the point Kripke (1982) made about understanding meaning also applies to understanding social interaction. This understanding involves extending what one has learned from a finite number of past observations to provide normative guidance for an indefinitely complicated future. Kripke argues (to my mind correctly) that what one should do in the future is inevitably underdetermined by the infinite possible interpretations of the past. Moreover, no matter how much one attempts to make the (...)
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  20.  3
    Not Pictured.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2014 - In George Dunn & James South (eds.), Veronica Mars and Philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 184–197.
    There's so much more to being a detective than just seeing the clues right in front of your eyes. What makes a detective great is that she can figure out the truth she's not seeing—the hidden explanation behind an otherwise scattered array of facts and appearances. She can puzzle through the observed facts to get at the hidden truth. That's where Veronica Mars excels, and that's what makes her special. Veronica is, of course, no stranger to fieldwork. Being a detective (...)
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  21.  48
    Transformative Understanding Acquisition.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld - 2017 - Res Philosophica 94 (1):67-93.
    Some experiences change who we are in ways we cannot understand until we have that very experience. In this paper I argue that so-called “transformative experiences” can not only bring about new understanding, but can actually be brought out by the gain of understanding itself. Coming to understand something new can change you. I argue that not only is understanding acquisition potentially a kind of transformative experience; given some of the recent philosophy of the phenomenology of understanding, it is a (...)
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  22.  32
    Understanding for Hire.Daniel A. Wilkenfeld & Christa M. Johnson - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (3):389-405.
    In this paper, we will explore one way in which understanding can—and, we will argue, should—be valuable. We will do this by drawing on what has been said about the different ways knowledge can be valuable. Our main contribution will be to identify one heretofore undiscussed way knowledge could be valuable, but isn’t—specifically, having value to someone other than the understander. We suggest that it is a desideratum on an account of understanding that understanding have the specified type of value; (...)
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