In Pursuit of Understanding

Understanding consists in integration and coherence amongst beliefs, the individual's grasping of these connections, and the explanatory power of the individual's representations of the world. Understanding is under-theorised in contemporary epistemology. Most epistemological research focuses on knowledge, and related epistemic kinds such as knowledge-relevant justification. This dissertation begins by motivating the value of thinking about understanding in epistemology. This is the aim of section A, 'Understanding and Value'.;I begin, in 'Understanding, Integration, and Epistemic Value', with a debate about the ultimate bearers of epistemic value. Veritism holds that attaining true belief (and avoiding false belief) is the sole ultimate epistemic good. All epistemic value is ultimately epistemically valuable in virtue of its relation to these dual aims. Value pluralists deny this, and posit plural sources of epistemic value. I suggest this debate has reached an impasse, and I appeal to the nature and value of understanding to make progress. I argue that veritism is committed to a supervenience thesis stating that if two sets of beliefs are identical with regard to true and false beliefs and propensity to gain further true beliefs and avoid false beliefs, then they have equivalent levels of epistemic value. I argue that comparing mere true belief with understanding indicates the supervenience thesis is false. Understanding contributes value that does not reduce to the value of true belief.;I motivate this claim by arguing that the integration and coherence-making relations characteristic of understanding have epistemic value, and this value does not reduce to the value of true belief. I argue, further, these relations amongst beliefs do not themselves reduce to further true beliefs; the structure of beliefs that constitutes understanding is not simply a matter of aggregating further true beliefs.;This paper thereby motivates the claim that thinking about understanding can help advance and inform debates in epistemology. It also motivates a second claim: understanding has a distinctive nature and value. When we understand, our beliefs and knowledge cohere; structural, organising relations are formed and maintained. This epistemic kind is not simply a matter of possessing more knowledge. (Or, if understanding is an agglomeration of knowledge, it is a distinctive and important kind of knowledge, one characterised by structural relations amongst beliefs.) I thus hope to motivate the importance of theorising about, and pursuing, understanding.;The second essay, 'Evidentialism and Moral Encroachment', considers a recent debate in social epistemology. Like in the first essay, I employ an existing debate to motivate the importance of focusing on understanding in our epistemological theorising.;Evidentialist views hold that the epistemic justification of a doxastic attitude depends solely on evidential considerations, such as whether the attitude fits the available evidence. Evidentialism is an 'intellectualist' view. Intellectualism in epistemology holds that the whether a belief is epistemically justified depends exclusively on truth-related factors. Since these truth-related factors can include whether the belief was reliably formed, whether it manifests intellectual virtue, and so on, intellectualism is (usually understood as) more permissive than evidentialism, which restricts the relevant features to evidential considerations, such as possessed evidence. It is worth emphasising at this juncture that evidentialism can be understood in various ways, depending on what evidential considerations are relevant to epistemic justification, whether features other than epistemic justification bear on what you ought believe, and so on.;Intellectualist positions, including evidentialist views, hold that practical and moral considerations do not bear on whether a belief is epistemically justified. Recently advocates of moral encroachment, by contrast, argue that moral considerations affect whether a belief is epistemically justified. Moral encroachment holds that if the belief can morally wrong a person or group then more evidence is required to epistemically justify that belief. Advocates of moral encroachment employ examples like the following: Administrative Assistant. A consultant visits an office. He knows that few people visit the office who are not employees of the firm and that almost every woman employee is an administrative assistant. The consultant sees a woman walking down the corridor and forms the belief 'she is an administrative assistant'..;Advocates of moral encroachment argue that the consultant's belief is morally wrong, and the moral features of the case render the belief epistemically unjustified. Some theorists focus on the fact that the consultant does not rule out relevant alternatives and argue that this alternative is rendered salient by moral factors. Other theorists focus on the idea that the belief can wrong a person and so the moral stakes are raised and the thresholds for justified belief is thereby higher. Either way, moral encroachment maintains that evidence that would normally suffice for belief is rendered epistemically insufficient by moral features. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).