Biases affect much of our epistemic lives. Do they affect how we understand things? For Linda Zagzebski, we only understand something when we manifest intellectual virtues or skills. Relying on how widespread biases are, J. Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard raise a skeptical objection to understanding so conceived. It runs as follows: most of us seem to understand many things. We genuinely understand only when we manifest intellectual virtues or skills, and are cognitively responsible for so doing. Yet much of (...) what we seem to understand consists in conceptions whose formation could have easily been due to biases instead, and the work of biases is opaque to reflection. If conceptions constituting how we understand things could have easily been due to biases, then we are not cognitively responsible for them because we cannot reflectively appraise what we understand. So, we are mistaken in thinking we genuinely understand most of the time. I will defend the grounding of understanding in intellectual virtues and skills from Carter and Pritchard’s objection. We are cognitively responsible for understanding when we manifest our expertise. We can do so, I will argue, without being required to reflectively appraise what we understand. (shrink)

Casting dirty looks is morally wrong when it encourages gender stereotypes and objectifies the woman looked at. Oglers are to blame for the harm done. And, if an ogler were to merely imagine what he perceives, we would blame him less than for his stare. So, in many such cases, we must be at least partly be blaming the ogler for being in the very perceptual state he is then in—for his male gaze. This line of reasoning goes against ethical (...) orthodoxy, which claims that perception is simply not the kind of thing for which the agents who perceive could be blamed. Against orthodoxy, I argue that the moral relevance of the male gaze implies that perception is the kind of thing for which perceiving agents could be blamed. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on the relation between Quine’s notion of ontological commitment and his philosophy of science. I distinguish and present Quine’s solutions to two problems of existence, a semantic problem, roughly amounting to asking how existence can be expressed within a certain language, and an epistemological problem, roughly amounting to how the members of the scientific community can decide which theories are warranted. The gap between these problems is filled by noticing that existence is equated by Quine with reference, (...) and that the principle of context imposes the epistemological primacy of truth over reference. Truth, in its turn, albeit given a purely semantic account along the lines of Tarski, is coextensive with the notion of warranted belief. (shrink)

This volume explores how understanding relates to conscious experience. In doing so, it builds bridges between different philosophical disciplines and provides a metaphysically robust characterization of understanding, both in and beyond science. The past two decades have witnessed growing interest from epistemologists, philosophers of science, philosophers of mind, and ethicists in the nature and value of intellectual understanding. This volume features original essays from leading scholars of understanding and the phenomenal experiences that underlie it. The chapters are divided into three (...) thematic sections. Part 1 provides theoretical characterizations of understanding, including Henk de Regt’s defense of a contextual theory of scientific understanding and a debate whether scientific inference and explanatory power are necessary or central features of understanding. Part 2 explores how conscious experience and understanding are related. The chapters articulate a phenomenal theory of understanding and address themes that are connected to understanding, including awareness, transformative experiences, and exemplification. Finally, Part 3 is devoted to domain-specific inquiries about understanding, such as logical proofs, particle physics, cognitive enhancement, and moral understanding. (shrink)