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5 Reliability and the Sense of Understanding S t e P H e n R . g R i m m L If we are fortunate, at some point while pursuing the answer to one of our explanation-seeking why-questions we will experience a sense of understanding . In other words, we will seem to “grasp” or “see” what it is that accounts for the thing we want to explain, a moment of “grasping” or “seeing” that is often accompanied by a distinctive phenomenology—perhaps even a phenomenology along the lines of the celebrated “aha” experience. In a series of articles J. D. Trout (2002, 2005, 2007) argues that the sense of understanding that we enjoy at these moments is deeply unreliable.1 In other words, he argues that our sense that we can “grasp” or “see” why things are one way rather than another is poorly connected with the truth about why things are one way rather than another. If correct, this would have wide-ranging implications for our ability to understand the world. For instance, if Trout is right, then on the uncommon occasion when our sense of understanding actually does manage to grasp the truth, the grasp will presumably be too accidental or tenuous to have much if any positive epistemic status. For comparison, suppose you claim to have the ability to determine whether someone is honest just by looking at them. If it turns out that most of the people that you classify as honest are inveterate liars, then on the few occasions when you identify a genuinely honest person we would not say that your identification had much going for it in the way of positive epistemic status. To earn that a more secure link to the truth is required. In the following two passages, Trout suggests that the history of science is replete with evidence against the reliability of the sense of understanding. 83 reliability and the sense of understanding de Regt Txt•.indd 83 9/8/09 11:26:59 AM 84 Peirce identifies the distinctive cognitive experience of explanatory understanding by isolating the final moment of acceptance; the good explanation “is turned back and forth like a key in a lock.” This description alone should supply little solace to those holding that good explanations are epistemically reliable. After all, alchemists surely felt the key turn, but once inside we find only false descriptions of causal mechanisms. And when Galen arrived at a diagnosis of melancholy due to black bile, his sense of understanding was so gratifying it must have balanced his humors. (2002, 213) Later, he is even more emphatic: The fact is, our history is littered with inaccurate explanations we confidently thought were obviously true: the explanation for mental illness in terms of demonic possession, the humoral theory of illness, and so on. The sense of understanding would be epistemically idle phenomenology were it not so poisonous a combination of seduction and unreliability. It actually does harm, sometimes making us squeamish about accepting true claims that we don’t personally understand, and more often operating in the opposite direction, causing us to overconfidently accept false claims because they have a kind of anecdotal or theoretical charm. (2002, 229–30) By Trout’s lights, apparently, the unreliability of our sense of understanding is therefore just obvious; at any rate, even a casual look at the history of science confirms it.2 The list of those who were thoroughly, albeit mistakenly, convinced that they could “grasp” or “see” why things were one way rather than another—not just past figures such as Galen, Ptolemy, and the alchemists, but also more recently astrologers, CIA conspiracy theorists, and so on—goes on and on. In this chapter I will argue, first, that a bit of armchair empirical research suggests that Trout dramatically exaggerates the de facto unreliability of our sense of understanding. Second, I will point out that current clinical research reinforces what our armchair empirical research suggests: namely, that as a simple matter of record (and by and large), we are quite good at identifying why things are one way rather than another. One tempting conclusion to draw from this research is that typically, and contra Trout, our sense of understanding simply is reliable. Call this the “optimistic conclusion.” I will suggest below that the optimistic conclusion too is mistaken. What we need is a compromise posistephen r. grimm de Regt Txt•.indd 84 9/8/09 11:27:00 AM [18.218.184.214...

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