Abstract
In his “EMU and Inference,” Mark Newman European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 4(1):55–74, 2014 provides several interesting challenges to my explanatory model of understanding (EMU, Khalifa Philosophy of science, 79(1):15–37, 2012). I offer three replies to Newman’s paper. First, Newman incorrectly attributes to EMU an overly restrictive view about the role of abilities in understanding. Second, his main argument against EMU rests on this incorrect attribution, and would still face difficulties even if this attribution were correct. Third, contrary to his stated ambitions, his own, inferential model of understanding (IMU) does not have any distinctive advantages over EMU. These three points defend EMU against Newman’s objections.
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Notes
Hereafter, I refer to this piece as “Inaugurating Understanding.”
Note that in either case, many of the relevant abilities seem to be non-deductive in nature, pace logical chauvinism.
Indeed, in “Inaugurating Understanding,” I favored a pluralistic approach to explanation, so I lean towards a corresponding pluralism about its attendant epistemology. However, for the argument at hand, all that is needed is EMUA.
More precisely, let l 1 be a schematic description of an explanatory link and let l 2 be l 1 plus a description of how certain properties F 1 , …, F n produce (“are responsible for”) l 1 . Then we simply plug in l 2 into my condition c above: S’s understanding is a result of knowing that l 2 is the correct explanatory link between the explanans and the explanandum.
Since many of the details of this view will not bear on what follows, I refer readers to Newman’s work for further details.
Note that the person must have two beliefs: (1) the belief that q explains p; and (2) the belief that I know that q explains p. The second is the source of the “aha” feeling.
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This paper is a reply to DOI 10.1007/s13194-013-0075-0
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Khalifa, K. EMU defended: reply to Newman (2014). Euro Jnl Phil Sci 5, 377–385 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-015-0112-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-015-0112-2