Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge

Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge PDF Author: Kareem Khalifa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107195632
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The first comprehensive exploration of the nature and value of understanding, addressing burgeoning debates in epistemology and philosophy of science.

Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge

Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge PDF Author: Kareem Khalifa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107195632
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first comprehensive exploration of the nature and value of understanding, addressing burgeoning debates in epistemology and philosophy of science.

Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge

Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge PDF Author: Kareem Khalifa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781316646915
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From antiquity to the end of the twentieth century, philosophical discussions of understanding remained undeveloped, guided by a 'received view' that takes understanding to be nothing more than knowledge of an explanation. More recently, however, this received view has been criticized, and bold new philosophical proposals about understanding have emerged in its place. In this book, Kareem Khalifa argues that the received view should be revised but not abandoned. In doing so, he clarifies and answers the most central questions in this burgeoning field of philosophical research: what kinds of cognitive abilities are involved in understanding? What is the relationship between the understanding that explanations provide and the understanding that experts have of broader subject matters? Can there be understanding without explanation? How can one understand something on the basis of falsehoods? Is understanding a species of knowledge? What is the value of understanding?

The Art of Explanation

The Art of Explanation PDF Author: Lee LeFever
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118417313
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Your guide to becoming an explanation specialist. You've done the hard work. Your product or service works beautifully - but something is missing. People just don't see the big idea - and it's keeping you from being successful. Your idea has an explanation problem. The Art of Explanation is for business people, educators and influencers who want to improve their explanation skills and start solving explanation problems. Author Lee LeFever is the founder of Common Craft, a company known around the world for making complex ideas easy to understand through short animated videos. He is your guide to helping audiences fall in love with your ideas, products or services through better explanations in any medium. You will learn to: Plan: Learn explanation basics, what causes them to fail and how to diagnose explanation problems. Package: Using simple elements, create an explanation strategy that builds confidence and motivates your audience. Present: Produce remarkable explanations with visuals and media. The Art of Explanation is your invitation to become an explanation specialist and see why explanation is now a fundamental skill for professionals.

Understanding People

Understanding People PDF Author: Alan Millar
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191531189
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Alan Millar examines our understanding of why people think and act as they do. His key theme is that normative considerations form an indispensable part of the explanatory framework in terms of which we seek to understand each other. Millar defends a conception according to which normativity is linked to reasons. On this basis he examines the structure of certain normative commitments incurred by having propositional attitudes. Controversially, he argues that ascriptions of beliefs and intentions in and of themselves attribute normative commitments and that this has implications for the psychology of believing and intending. Indeed, all propositional attitudes of the sort we ascribe to people have a normative dimension, since possessing the concepts that the attitudes implicate is of its very nature commitment-incurring. The ramifications of these views for our understanding of people is explored. Millar offers illuminating discussions of reasons for belief and reasons for action; the explanation of beliefs and actions in terms of the subject's reasons; the idea that simulation has a key role in understanding people; and the limits of explanation in terms of propositional attitudes. He compares and contrasts the commitments incurred by propositional attitudes with those incurred by participating in practices, arguing that the former should not be assimilated to the latter. Understanding People will be of great interest to most philosophers of mind, as well as to those working on practical and theoretical reasoning.

Explaining Understanding

Explaining Understanding PDF Author: Stephen R. Grimm
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317414160
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
What does it mean to understand something? What types of understanding can be distinguished? Is understanding always provided by explanations? And how is it related to knowledge? Such questions have attracted considerable interest in epistemology recently. These discussions, however, have not yet engaged insights about explanations and theories developed in philosophy of science. Conversely, philosophers of science have debated the nature of explanations and theories, while dismissing understanding as a psychological by-product. In this book, epistemologists and philosophers of science together address basic questions about the nature of understanding, providing a new overview of the field. False theories, cognitive bias, transparency, coherency, and other important issues are discussed. Its 15 original chapters are essential reading for researchers and graduate students interested in the current debates about understanding.

Understanding and Explanation

Understanding and Explanation PDF Author: Karl-Otto Apel
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262510417
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Understanding and Explanation clarifies the "explanation versus understanding" debate that has become central to the philosophy of the social sciences.

The Nature of Scientific Thinking

The Nature of Scientific Thinking PDF Author: J. Faye
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137389834
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Scientific thinking must be understood as an activity. The acts of interpretation, representation, and explanation are the cognitive processes by which scientific thinking leads to understanding. The book explores the nature of these processes and describes how scientific thinking can only be grasped from a pragmatic perspective.

Scientific Understanding

Scientific Understanding PDF Author: Henk W. de Regt
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822971240
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
To most scientists, and to those interested in the sciences, understanding is the ultimate aim of scientific endeavor. In spite of this, understanding, and how it is achieved, has received little attention in recent philosophy of science. Scientific Understanding seeks to reverse this trend by providing original and in-depth accounts of the concept of understanding and its essential role in the scientific process. To this end, the chapters in this volume explore and develop three key topics: understanding and explanation, understanding and models, and understanding in scientific practice. Earlier philosophers, such as Carl Hempel, dismissed understanding as subjective and pragmatic. They believed that the essence of science was to be found in scientific theories and explanations. In Scientific Understanding, the contributors maintain that we must also consider the relation between explanations and the scientists who construct and use them. They focus on understanding as the cognitive state that is a goal of explanation and on the understanding of theories and models as a means to this end. The chapters in this book highlight the multifaceted nature of the process of scientific research. The contributors examine current uses of theory, models, simulations, and experiments to evaluate the degree to which these elements contribute to understanding. Their analyses pay due attention to the roles of intelligibility, tacit knowledge, and feelings of understanding. Furthermore, they investigate how understanding is obtained within diverse scientific disciplines and examine how the acquisition of understanding depends on specific contexts, the objects of study, and the stated aims of research.

Explanation and Understanding

Explanation and Understanding PDF Author: Georg Henrik von Wright
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801489365
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
In 'Explanation and Understanding' von Wright argues that human action cannot be explained causally by scientific or 'natural' laws, but must be understood 'intentionally'.

Scientific Explanation

Scientific Explanation PDF Author: Erik Weber
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400764464
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
When scientist investigate why things happen, they aim at giving an explanation. But what does a scientific explanation look like? In the first chapter (Theories of Scientific Explanation) of this book, the milestones in the debate on how to characterize scientific explanations are exposed. The second chapter (How to Study Scientific Explanation?) scrutinizes the working-method of three important philosophers of explanation, Carl Hempel, Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon and shows what went wrong. Next, it is the responsibility of current philosophers of explanation to go on where Hempel, Kitcher and Salmon failed. However, we should go on in a clever way. We call this clever way the pragmatic approach to scientific explanation and clarify briefly what this approach consists in. The third chapter (A Toolbox for Describing and Evaluating Explanatory Practices) elaborates the pragmatic approach by presenting a toolbox for analysing scientific explanation. In the last chapter (Examples of Descriptions and Evaluations of Explanatory Practices) the approach is illustrated with real-life examples of scientists aiming at explaining. This book can be used as a textbook for intermediate philosophy of science courses and is also valuable as “suggested reading” for introductory courses in philosophy of science. The way the book is set up makes it an excellent study and research guide for advanced (MA and PhD) students that work on the topic of scientific explanation. Finally, it is a handy source and reference book for senior researchers in the field of scientific explanations and – more generally – for all philosophers of science. ​