Why Understanding-why is Contrastive
Egler,Miguel
Egler,Miguel
Abstract
Contrastivism about interrogative understanding is the view that ‘S understands why p’ posits a three-place epistemic relation between a subject S, a fact p, and an alternative to p, q. This thesis stands in stark opposition to the natural idea that a subject S can be said to understand why p simpliciter. I argue that contrastivism offers the best explanation for the fact that evaluations of the form ‘S understands why p’ vary depending on the alternatives to p under consideration. I also show that contrastivism offers valuable resources with which to explain the gradability of interrogative understanding attributions, as well as the sensitivity of these attributions to the perceived degree of epistemic demandingness of different contexts.
Description
Funding Information: Many thanks to Matteo Colombo, Insa Lawler, Lewis Ross, Justin Snedegar, and to audiences at GAP10 and the 11th Principia International Symposium for valuable discussions on this material. I am also indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their excellent comments which have greatly improved this paper. Publisher Copyright: © 2021, The Author(s).
Date
2021-12
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Research Projects
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Keywords
Understanding, Understanding-why, Contrastivism, Gradability, Context-sensitivity
Citation
Egler, M 2021, 'Why Understanding-why is Contrastive', Synthese, vol. 199, no. 3-4, pp. 6061-6083. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03059-x