Fallibility’s Payoff

Fallibilism with respect to knowledge is vulnerable to either a version of Moore’s paradox or to Kripke’s dogmatism paradox. Fallibilism with respect to understanding is not. The recognition of the perennial possibility of error advances understanding by sensitizing thinkers to exactly where and how they might be wrong. Thus the capacity to make mistakes is an epistemic achievement rather than a failing.

Casting in Bold Relief

Laboratory experiments, thought experiments, and literary fictions are felicitous falsehoods. They distance themselves from the facts they bear on to screen out irrelevant, potentially confounding factors. This enables them to exemplify, and provide epistemic access to features that would otherwise be obscured.

Exemplification in Understanding

Exemplification is the semantic device that connects samples and examples to their objects. They highlight features, making them manifest. Exemplars thus afford epistemic access to features of things that we might otherwise overlook. By exemplifying, symbols that are not truth-apt embody and convey understanding.

Distancing from Truth

Too strong an emphasis on truth prevents epistemology from accommodating the cognitive contributions of science. Models and idealizations function as felicitous falsehoods that enhance the understanding of a range of phenomena. What emerges is a holism in which networks of mutually reinforcing cognitive commitments stand or fall together.

Objectivity: A Bulwark against Bias

An account is procedurally objective just in case it is either impersonal or impartial. This is compatible with its being perspectival. As van Fraassen argues, science must be perspectival if it is to be responsive to evidence.

Reconfiguring the Realm

Here Elgin sketches the main themes of True Enough. Although effective scientific models and thought experiments are not true, they embody a genuine understanding of the phenomena they concern. Works of art do the same. To accommodate the epistemic contributions of science and art, epistemic normativity cannot be grounded in reliability or truth-conduciveness. Rather it emerges from responsible epistemic agency.

Borders and Crossings

Disciplinary understanding is answerable to normative and methodological demands. This raises the question whether a work in one discipline can also belong to another. Can works of art, functioning as such, satisfy the demands of history? If so, they provide a historical understanding of their subject.

Irreconcilable Differences

Aesthetic judgments are procedurally objective but neither ensure nor aspire to consensus, even in the long run. Reasons are adduced in aesthetic debates not to defeat opposing interpretations but to highlight features of the works they bear on. Antithetical interpretations of works of art exemplify different features.

Embodied Understanding

Dances, although not truth-apt, embody and advance understanding via exemplification. They highlight features and underscore their significance. Being symbols, dances require interpretation. Audiences need to know how they symbolize to glean the understanding they convey.

Intellectual Integrity

Legislating members of a realm of epistemic ends have obligations to one another that are simultaneously epistemic and moral. Respecting these obligations not only promotes the ends of the discipline, it is in part constitutive of those ends. Falsification, fabrication, suppression of results and plagiarism undermine the epistemic enterprise. They are betrayals of trust.