Varieties of Understanding : New Perspectives From Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology

"What does it mean to understand something? What is the essence of understanding, when compared across multiple domains? Varieties of Understanding offers new and original work on the nature of understanding, raising questions about what understanding looks like from different perspectives and exploring how ordinary people use the notion of understanding. According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world-that it calls on different cognitive resources and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus, in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed-mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. This volume brings together some of the world's leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians in order to shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight."-- Provided by publisher "According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world--it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed--mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world's leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight." -- Oxford Scholarship Online According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world—it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed—mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even __be__ appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world’s leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight. Cover 1 Varieties of Understanding 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 List of Contributors 8 1. Varieties of Understanding 10 Part I 24 2. Perspectives and Frames in Pursuit of Ultimate Understanding 26 3. The Epistemologies of the Humanities and the Sciences 56 4. On Literary Understanding 76 5. Recasting the “Scientism” Debate 102 6. Firsthand Knowledge and Understanding 118 7. Toward a Theory of Understanding 132 Part II 146 8. Technology as Teacher: How Children Learn from Social Robots 148 9. Understanding Others to Learn and Help Others Learn: Inferences, Evaluation, and Communication in Early Childhood 176 10. How Do Partial Understandings Work? 200 11. Mechanistic versus Functional Understanding 218 12. Are Humans Intuitive Philosophers? 240 Part III 260 13. Religious Understanding and Cultured Practices 262 Index 284 In this volume some of the leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians in the world shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.