The Uses of Truth: Is There Room for Reconciliation of Factivist and Non-Factivist Accounts of Scientific Understanding?

ABSTRACT

One of the most lively debates on scientific understanding is standardly presented as a controversy between the so-called factivists, who argue that understanding implies truth, and the non-factivists whose position is that truth is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding. A closer look at the debate, however, reveals that the borderline between factivism and non-factivism is not as clear-cut as it looks at first glance. Some of those who claim to be quasi-factivists come suspiciously close to the position of their opponents, the non-factivist, from whom they pretend to differ. The non-factivist, in turn, acknowledges that some sort of ‘answering to the facts’ is indispensable for understanding. This paper discusses an example of convergence of the initially rival positions in the debate on understanding and truth: the use of the same substitute for truth by the quasi-factivist Kareem Khalifa and the non-factivists Henk de Regt and Victor Gijsbers. It is argued that the use of ‘effectiveness’ as a substitute for truth by both parties is not an occasional coincidence of terms, it rather speaks about a deeper similarity which have important implications for understanding the essential features of scientific understanding.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at EENPS 2021 (Belgrade, 9–11 June 2021) and at the EENPS Work-in-Progress Reading Group (online, 6 December, 2021). I am indebted to all those who shared their thoughts on the text and encouraged me to improve it. I am especially grateful for the critical comments of the two anonymous reviewers, who helped significantly to clarify the basic concepts and the arguments.

Notes

1 For recent reviews of the debate, which adheres to its standard presentation, see (Baumberger, Beisbart, and Brun 2017) and (De Regt and Baumberger 2019). The view that philosophers are ‘deeply divided over the connection between understanding and the facts’ is also supported by Hannon (2021).

2 Well-known factivists (or rather quasi-factivists) are Kvanvig (2003), Grimm (2006), Pritchard (2007), Strevens (2008), Mizrahi (2012), Khalifa (2017). The terms ‘quasi-factivism’, ‘quasi-factivists’ and ‘quasi-factive understanding’ have been coined by Khalifa (2017).

3 Among the most famous defenders of non-factivism are Zagrebski (2001), Elgin (2004, 2009, 2017), Bokulich (2008), Riggs (2009), De Regt (2015), Potochnik (2017).

4 Applied to understanding, the term factivity was probably first used by Elgin (2004): ‘Understanding is a cognitive success term but, in my view, not a factive’ (Elgin 2004, 120). Initially, the debate about the factivity of understanding was conducted mainly in epistemology (Kvanvig 2003; Elgin 2004; Elgin 2009), where examples from the history of science were sporadically discussed. In the philosophy of science, the label ‘factivity’ gradually began to be used thanks to De Regt (2015), see also (Bangu 2017).

5 The presence of this tendency does not mean that no attempts are made to defend ‘strictly factive theories of understanding’ – see e.g. (Rice 2016; Lawler 2021; Ross 2021) or non-factive theories – see Doyle et al. (2019).

6 Listen for example to ‘Should Friends and Frenemies of Understanding be Friends? Discussing de Regt’, a talk given on May 13, 2021, at a conference hosted by the Department of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Bucharest. The record of the talk is available at (58) Kareem Khalifa, ‘Should Friends and Frenemies of Understanding be Friends?’ – YouTube.

7 By using the term ‘veridicality’ instead of ‘factivity’ de Regt and Gijsbers broaden the scope of their attack. Thus a target of their criticism become not only the factivists who reduce understanding to propositional knowledge, which is truth-apt, but also those who adopt a broader notion of truthfulness (e.g. ‘representational accuracy’, ‘getting it right’, etc.), which is applicable to non-propositional representational devises (e.g. material models, diagrams, etc.) that are broadly taken to provide understanding. De Regt and Gijsbers argue that replacing truth by any broader notion of representational adequacy does not strengthen the factivist position as far as there are examples of understanding providers, which do not satisfy even the most liberal adequacy condition.

8 The idea to use ‘acceptance’ as a substitute for ‘belief’ is not new, as Khalifa himself admits. He has borrowed it from Cohen (1992) and contrasts his own use of ‘acceptance’ with that of Elgin (2004).

9 The Ideal Gas Law (P.V = n.R.T) was first formulated by E. Clapeyron in 1834 as a generalization of the empirical Boyle’s law, Charles’ law, Avogadro’s law and Gay-Lussac’s law. Later the Ideal Gas Law was theoretically derived from the principles of the Kinetic Theory of Gases. This derivation was made possible due to the mentioned above simplifying assumptions about the mass and the dynamic properties of the molecules of the ideal gas. These simplifying assumptions are literary false, nevertheless together with the principles of the Kinetic Theory of Gases they provide us with understanding of the Ideal Gas Law and the phenomena which it describes.

10 The term ‘material inference’ has been used in philosophical literature in various ways. Sellars (1953) and Brandom (1994, 2000) for example, call ‘material’ the inferences the validity of which depends on the meanings (the content) of the concepts that appear in the premises. In a similar way the term is used by Brigandt (2010). Norton (2003, 2021), however, called ‘material’ the inferences that are licensed by ‘material facts’ or ‘material postulates’. The use of ‘material inference’ in this paper is closer to that of Norton rather than to the traditional use made popular by Sellars and Brandom.

11 This weaker inferentialism about predictions is compatible with Salmon’s view that all predictions ‘construed broadly enough … include inference from the observed to the unobserved’ (Salmon 1978, 684).

12 The use of the term ‘inferential capacities’ here is similar to that in (Suárez 2004).