Catherine Z. Elgin
Papers on Understanding

• Models as Felicitous Falsehoods (Principia 26(1), 2022, 7-23.)
  Abstract: I argue that models enable us to understand reality in ways that we would be unable to do if we restricted ourselves to the unvarnished truth. The point is not just that the features that a model skirts can permissibly be neglected. They ought to be neglected. Too much information occludes patterns that figure in an understanding of the phenomena. The regularities a model reveals are real and informative. But many of them show up only under idealizing assumptions.
  
  
• Understanding Understanding Art (Épistémologie de l'Esthétique ed. Vincent Granata and Roger Pouivet. Presses Universitaire de Rennes, 2020, pp. 139-150.)
  Abstract: Elsewhere I have argued that art embodies and advances understanding. If this is so, then works of art and other things temporarily functioning as works of art fall within the province of epistemology. Here, I will take this for granted. It might seem to follow immediately that aesthetics is a branch of epistemology -- namely the branch that concerns itself with the ways art embodies and advances understanding. Things are not so straightforward. For aesthetics to be a branch of epistemology rather than simply being displaced, supplanted, or swallowed up by epistemology, there must be something distinctive about the ways art advances understanding. If there is, then aesthetics could concern itself with that.
  
  
• Epistemic Gatekeepers: The Role of Aesthetic Factors in Science (The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination, and Understanding ed. Steven French and Milena Ivanova. London: Routledge, 2020, pp. 21-35.)
  Abstract: Although aesthetic factors like elegance and symmetry are not truth-conducive, they contribute to science by playing a regulative role. They mark out defeasible conditions on scientific acceptability. They are integral to establishing the contours of scientific understanding.
  
  
• Imaginative Investigations: Thought Experiments in Science, Philosophy and Literature (Literature as Thought Experiment ed. Faulk Bornmüller, Johannes Frazen, Mathis Lessau. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2019, pp. 1-16.)
  Abstract: I argue that literary fictions function as thought experiments. Like thought experiments in science and philosophy, literary fictions exemplify features and patterns, making them salient and enabling us to recognize them in the real world. To make my case, I show how Oedipus Rex can be interpreted as a though experiment testing Aristotle's contention that we should call no man happy until he is dead.
  
  
• Epistemic Virtues in Understanding (Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology ed. Heather Battaly. London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 330-339.)
  Abstract: According to one version of Kant's Categorical Imperative, moral agents should act only on maxims that they could endorse as legislating members of a realm of ends. I extend this to the epistemic realm. Epistemic agents should view themselves as legislating members of a realm of epistemic ends. The members of such communities devise and reflectively endorse the laws, standards, norms, and practices that bind them in their cognitive endeavors. The epistemic virtues are the character traits that enable them to function as members of a realm of epistemic ends.
  
  
• The Commonwealth of Epistemic Ends (The Ethics of Belief ed. Jonathan Matheson and Rico Vitz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 244-260. )
  Abstract: This chapter develops a critique of a pair of widely accepted epistemic principles: epistemic individualism, the states of an individual epistemic agent are that which constitute the agent's 'epistemic core', and attunement, the core deliverances that justify an agent's beliefs do so because they properly attune the agent to their objects. It develops a critique using Orwell's 1984. It argues that the plight of the novel's protagonist, Winston, reveals problems for each of the theses and that the support of a non-coercive community is necessary for having beliefs at all, let alone having the kind of beliefs that could amount to knowledge. It then (i) explains the relationship between the Orwellian thought experiment and concrete cases of epistemic injustice, and (ii) proposes a Kantian solution to the problems that the experiment raises-namely, that epistemic agents ought to regard themselves as legislators in a commonwealth of epistemic ends.
  
  
• Epistemic Agency (Theory and Research in Education 11(2), 2013, 135-152.)
  Abstract: Virtue epistemologists hold that knowledge results from the display of epistemic virtues – openmindedness, rigor, sensitivity to evidence, and the like. But epistemology cannot rest satisfied with a list of the virtues. What is wanted is a criterion for being an epistemic virtue. An extension of a formulation of Kant's categorical imperative yields such a criterion. Epistemic agents should think of themselves as, and act as, legislating members of a realm of epistemic ends: they make the rules, devise the methods, and set the standards that bind them. The epistemic virtues are the traits of intellectual character that equip them to do so. Students then not only need to learn the standards, methods, and rules of the various disciplines, they also need to learn to think of themselves as, and how to behave as, legislating members of epistemic realms who are responsible for what they and their fellows believe. This requires teaching them to respect reasons, and to take themselves to be responsible for formulating reasons their peers can respect.
  
  
• Fiction as Thought Experiment (Perspectives in Science, 22(2014), 55-75.)
  
  
• Understanding's Tethers (Epistemology: Contexts, Values, and Disagreement ed, Christoph Jäger and Winifrid Löffler. Ontos Verlag, 2011, pp. 131-146.)
  Abstract: It seems natural to assume that understanding, like knowledge, requires truth. But natural science affords understanding and uses models and thought experiments that are not, and do not purport to be true. To accommodate science, we need a theory of understanding that recognizes the epistemic functions of representations that are not true. I contend that models and thought experiments are felicitous falsehoods. I argue that they afford insight into the phenomena they concern by exemplifying features they share with those phenomena. In effect they show rather than say something about those phenomena.
  
  
• Ignorance, Error, and the Advancement of Understanding ('Ignorancia, Error y el Avance de la Comprensión', Error y Conocimiento: La Gestatin de la Ignorancia desde la Didáctia, la Ethica y la Filosofía ed. Victòria Campos, Anna Estany, Merèc Izquierdo. Grenada: Comares, forthcoming (Translated into Spanish by Remei Capdevila.))
  
  
• Is Understanding Factive? (Epistemic Value ed. Duncan Pritchard, Allan Miller, Adrian Hadock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 332-330.)
  
  
• Emotion and Understanding (Epistemology and Emotions ed. Georg Brun, Uvli Dogouglu and Dominique Kunzle. London: Ashgate, 2007, 33-50.)
  Abstract: Emotions share important cognitive functions with perceptions and beliefs. Like perceptions, they afford epistemic access to a range of response-dependent properties, such as being admirable or contemptible, and provide evidence of responseindependent properties that trigger them. Fear is evidence of danger; trust is evidence of reliability. Like beliefs, emotions provide orientations that render particular facets of things salient. In the grip of an emotion, we notice things we would otherwise miss. The variability and volatility of emotional deliverances might seem to undermine their claim to epistemic standing. I argue that variability and volatility can be epistemic assets, keying the subject to multiple, quickly changing features of things. Emotions, like other modes of epistemic access, are subject to refinement to increase their epistemic yield. The arts provide opportunities for such refinement.
  
  
• The Laboratory of the Mind (A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative and Knowledge, ed. Wolfgang Huemer, John Gibson, and Luca Pocci. London, Routledge, 2007, 43-54.)
  Abstract: I argue that works of fiction function as thought experiments. Both literary fictions and scientific thought experiments are imaginative constructions that advance understanding by exemplifying features and playing out their consequences. Although the features occur in actuality, they are subtle, easily overshadowed, or otherwise difficulty to discern. The function of a literary or scientific thought experiment is to provide a context that makes them manifest and displays their significance. Literary fictions are more elaborate than scientific thought experiments. They largely set their own parameters, function in a dense field of alternatives, and admit of multiple, divergent interpretations. Like scientific thought experiments, such fictions are not, do not purport to be, and are not taken to be true. But both enable us to see or recognize truths that we would otherwise miss.
  
  
• Understanding and the Facts (Philosophical Studies 132, 2007, 33-42.)
  Abstract: If understanding is factive, the propositions that express an understanding are true. I argue that a factive conception of understanding is unduly restrictive. It neither reflects our practices in ascribing understanding nor does justice to contemporary science. For science uses idealizations and models that do not to mirror the facts. Strictly speaking, they are false. By appeal to exemplification, I devise a more generous, flexible conception of understanding that accommodates science, reflects our practices, and shows a sufficient but not slavish sensitivity to the facts.
  
  
• From Knowledge to Understanding (Epistemology Futures, Stephen Hetherington, ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 2006, pp. 199-215.)
  
  
• True Enough (Philosophical Issues 14, 2004, 113-121.)
  Abstract: Truth is standardly considered a requirement on epistemic acceptability. But science and philosophy deploy models, idealizations and thought experiments that prescind from truth to achieve other cognitive ends. I argue that such felicitous falsehoods function as cognitively useful fictions. They are cognitively useful because they exemplify and afford epistemic access to features they share with the relevant facts. They are falsehoods in that they diverge from the facts. Nonetheless, they are true enough to serve their epistemic purposes. Theories that contain them have testable consequences, hence are factually defeasible.
  
  
• Art in the Advancement of Understanding (American Philosophical Quarterly 39(1), 1-12, January 2002.)
  Abstract: Cognitive progress often involves reconfiguring a domain, bringing previously unrecognized likenesses, differences, patterns and discrepancies to light. I argue that the arts effect such reconfigurations, enabling us to discern and appreciate the importance of aspects of the domain that we had previously overlooked or underemphasized. I argue that so-called aesthetic devices like metaphor, fiction, and exemplification figure in our understanding of science as well as art. We cannot do justice to our scientific understanding while denying that art and its devices function cognitively.
  
  
• Creation as Reconfiguration (International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 16, 2002, 13-25.)
  Abstract: Creation in the arts and elsewhere involves reconfiguration of a domain and our approach to it. In creative work, we contrive new categories, drawing boundaries where they had not previously been drawn. We highlight hitherto overlooked properties and patterns. We reject standard approaches and conventional construals of the problems we confront. In so doing, I urge, we rework accepted syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints on the symbol systems we deploy.
  
  
• Interpretation and Understanding (Erkenntnis, 52, 2000, 175-183.)
  Abstract: To understand a term or other symbol, I argue, it is generally neither necessary nor sufficient to assign it a unique determinate reference. Independent of and prior to investigation, it is frequently indeterminate not only whether a sentence is true, but also what its truth conditions are. Nelson Goodman's discussions of likeness of meaning are deployed to explain how this can be so.
  
  
• Understanding: Art and Science (Philosophy and the Arts, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard Wettstein. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991, 196-208; reprinted in Synthese, 95, 1993, 13-28; in Lire Goodman,ed. J. Cometti. Combas: Editions d'Eclat, 1992, 49-67 (in French).)
  Abstract: This paper explores exemplification in art and science. Both scientific experiments and works of art highlight, underscore, display, or convey some of their own features. They thereby focus attention on them, and make them available for examination and projection. The Michelson-Morley experiment exemplifies the constancy of the speed of light. Pollock's Number One exemplifies the viscosity of paint. Still, science is said said to adhere to facts; art, to be indifferent to them. I argue otherwise. Science, like art, often scorns fact to advance understanding through fiction. Thought experiments are scientific fictions; literary and pictorial fictions, aesthetic thought experiments.