On Scientific Understanding:From The Perspective Of The Relationship Between Understanding And Explanation

In the history of the development of philosophy of science,Reichenbach,the main representative of logical empiricism,explicitly limits the study of philosophy of science to "the context of justification" while excluding "the context of discovery" from the study of philosophy of science.Hempel further studied the mechanism of scientific explanation and generalized the Deductive-Nomological Model and Inductive-Statistical Model.In recent years,with the development of the philosophy of science practice,philosophical discussion on the understanding of science has been paid more attention by philosophers of philosophy of science.They discussed the problem from the analysis of the relationship between scientific understanding and scientific explanation,and formed two kinds of Views: the philosophers of science represented by Strevens believed that scientific understanding is based on scientific explanation,or that scientific explanation is the logical premise for the formation of scientific understanding,and the logical sequence and inevitable relationship makes scientific understanding always inseparable from scientific explanation;however,the philosophers of science represented by Lipton believed that scientific understanding had nothing to do with scientific explanation,and scientific understanding could be realized without scientific explanation.He summarized the scientific understanding without explanation into four ways to achieve it.The two arguments about the relationship between scientific understanding and scientific explanation reflects the difference between them on the concept of scientific understanding.However,in the realization of scientific understanding activities,scientists' scientific research activities can at least include theoretical understanding activities and practical understanding activities of two levels.The philosophical basis of theoretical understanding is to abide by the tradition of coincidence theory in the sense of epistemology,to interact with the representation of the objective world under the premise of the dicision of subject and object,to understand the world through conceptual judgment and logical reasoning,so it is necessary to take explanation as the starting point;On the other hand,practical understanding is the contact and interaction with reality on the premise of understanding the subject's integration with the world in which it is located,which is embodied in the coping activities of skilled skills.Its philosophical basis is phenomenological tradition.The key to practical understanding lies in the understanding of the subject's intuitive response to the world,so it is concrete and empirical,and there is no need to take scientific explanation as the premise.Therefore,at the level of scientific theoretical activities,scientific understanding and scientific explanation cannot be separated,while at the level of scientific practical activities,scientific understanding is not necessarily related to scientific explanation.On the whole,the philosophical discussion on scientific understanding not only helps to promote the research horizon of contemporary philosophy of science,but also extends the philosophy of science from the "context of justification" to the "context of discovery",so as to promote the deepening development of scientific practice.