Understanding in Virtue Epistemology through an Islamic Lens — Epoche C2
What Zagzebski actually says about understanding Linda Zagzebski's Virtues of the Mind (1996) defines knowledge as a state of true belief arising out of acts of intellectual virtue; five years later, in an essay called 'Recovering Understanding', she argued that understanding is not a state of knowledge at all. It is the second claim, not the first, that this essay is about, and the earlier version of this essay got its polarity wrong. It presented Zagzebski as holding that understanding is "essentially a species of knowledge, albeit one attained through a process guided by virtuous cognitive faculties", and then offered, as a correction of her, the view that understanding is a higher-order achievement irreducible to propositional knowledge. That is not a correction of Zagzebski. It is her position, argued for at length and against the same opponents. The task worth doing is therefore a different one: to say what her account still leaves open, and to show that the Farabian material the essay reaches for answers precisely that. Two features of her framework do the work below, and both are peculiar to her rather than common property in the field. First, an intellectual virtue for Zagzebski is a deep and enduring acquired excellence of a person , with two components: a motivational component — a motivation to have cognitive contact with reality — and reliable success in attaining the end that motivation aims at. That is deliberately modelled on Aristotelian moral virtue, and it is what separates her from the faculty-based accounts on which a virtue is any reliable cognitive mechanism, eyesight included. On her account a well-functioning retina is not a virtue, because there is nobody in it to be motivated. Second, and following from this, her definition of knowledge is not a reliability condition dressed in ethical vocabulary. The act of intellectual virtue is an act the agent performs, and the credit for the true belief attaches to the agent rather than to the process. Against that background her claim about understanding is genuinely radical. In 'Recovering Understanding' she argues that the object of understanding is not a proposition. What one understands is a structure — parts standing in relations — and the state of understanding it is a state of representing that structure, often non-propositionally, in the way a map or a working model or a practical skill represents. From this she draws the conclusion the earlier essay wanted to draw against her: no quantity of true propositions about a subject adds up to understanding it, because the two are not the same kind of thing, and an accumulation of items in one category never yields an item in another. She adds a further mark, which is worth flagging because it is contested and unusual: understanding is, in the paradigm cases, transparent to its possessor in a way knowledge is not. One can be mistaken about whether one knows; one is in a much better position, from the inside, to tell whether one understands. One further repair before going on. The earlier text rested its argument on a distinction it attributed to Zagzebski between 'comprehension', glossed as grasping how things fit together, and a deeper 'understanding'. That is not the distinction her texts turn on, and the argument does not need it. Her operative contrast is between propositional knowledge and understanding, and 'grasping how things fit together' is on the understanding side of it, not on some intermediate rung. Why understanding cannot be knowledge with a better pedigree If the essay's thesis is not a correction of Zagzebski, it still needs an argument, because 'understanding is virtuously acquired knowledge' is a live position and the intuitive contrast between the encyclopaedist and the expert does not by itself refute it. Two arguments in the recent literature do refute it, and they work in different ways. The first is Jonathan Kvanvig's. In The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (2003) he constructs a case in which the two states come apart in the direction that matters. A reader works carefully through a book of Comanche history; the book is accurate and the reader ends up able to say why the Comanche did what they did, how the horse changed their economy, what followed from what. Unknown to the reader, nearly every other book on the shelf is unreliable, and the choice of that volume was luck. On the standard verdict this defeats knowledge: the reader's true beliefs are true by accident relative to the environment. Kvanvig's claim is that it does not defeat understanding — the reader really does grasp the structure, and grasping it is not made less of a grasp by the fact that the source might have been a bad one. If that verdict is right, understanding is not a species of knowledge, because it survives a condition that knowledge does not. The second is Duncan Pritchard's, and it cuts the other way, which is why the two together are stronger than either. In 'Knowledge, Understanding and Epistemic Value' (2009) he distinguishes two ways luck can intrude. In environmental luck the agent's route to the truth works exactly as it should, but the surroundings could easily have supplied a defeater — Kvanvig's shelf of bad books is of this kind. In intervening luck something actually comes between the agent's exercise of ability and the truth, so that the belief is true for a reason other than the ability. Pritchard argues that understanding is compatible with the first and not the second, and this gives him a positive characterisation: understanding is always a cognitive achievement, a success attributable to the agent's ability. Knowledge is not always an achievement — a great deal of testimonial knowledge is not — and that asymmetry is the reason the two states cannot be ranked on a single scale with understanding at the top. Notice what this does to the essay's original picture. The encyclopaedist who can recite the rulings of Islamic jurisprudence, an