University of Cambridge
Making Sense of Understanding: A Pragmatist Account of Scientific Understanding
Abstract
dc:description.abstractScientists strive to understand the world. Traditionally, philosophers of science have thought that this is a matter of constructing explanations, based on theories and laws, thereby gaining understanding of phenomena by explaining them. This thesis takes a radically different approach, instead relating the notion of understanding to the *activities* that scientists perform. Scientific understanding is not just a matter of representing or explaining the world, but a matter of practical and intelligent *doing*. Philosophers of science have continued to sell short the project of making sense of scientific understanding, limiting their views to the articulated and well-formed products of inquiry, like theory and explanation. In taking a pragmatist approach to the epistemology of understanding, I reorientate our theorising about understanding from products to processes, and from explanations to methods and concepts. I thereby provide an ecumenical account of scientific understanding that can accommodate the dynamics and heterogeneity of scientific practice. In Chapter 1, I argue against the dominant focus on explanatory understanding in philosophy of science, thereby making room for my own account of operational understanding. Chapter 2 provides an account of how concepts are essential constituents of understanding. Concepts frame entities so that scientists can think and talk about and interact with them intelligently. Chapter 3 gives an account of understanding-how, through my notion of operational understanding, which relates to the methods that structure and guide successful performances of activities. In Chapter 4, I take up the task of describing the *psychology* of understanding, the kind of *state* that understanding is, which I argue is accounted for in terms of *skill*. In Chapter 5, I develop an account of how cognitive devices — tools for thinking, like models and thought-experiments — facilitate and produce understanding.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2023
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Westerblad, Oscar
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Chang, Hasok
Subjects
dc:subject × 7Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.108244
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/367790