"The authors argue against certain philosophical distinctions between art and science; between verbal and nonverbal meaning; and between the affective and the cognitive. The book continues Goodman's argument against one traditional mode of philosophizing which privileges the notions of 'truth' and 'knowledge'. Hence, the book is in a broadly pragmatic tradition. It also deals in detail with such topics as meaning in architecture and the concept of 'variation' in art, and contains a superb critique of some important views in contemporary epistemology. This work will be savored even by those who will not accept all aspects of Goodman and Elgin's approach. Essential for all undergraduate philosophy collections." --Stanley Bates, Choice

This volume explores how understanding relates to conscious experience. In doing so, it builds bridges between different philosophical disciplines and provides a metaphysically robust characterization of understanding, both in and beyond science. The past two decades have witnessed growing interest from epistemologists, philosophers of science, philosophers of mind and ethicists in the nature and value of intellectual understanding. This volume features original essays on understanding and the phenomenal experiences that underlie it. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. Part 1 provides theoretical characterizations of understanding, including Henk de Regt’s defense of a contextual theory of scientific understanding and a debate on whether scientific inference and explanatory power are necessary or central features of understanding. Part 2 explores how conscious experience and understanding are related. The chapters articulate a phenomenal theory of understanding and address themes that are connected to understanding, including awareness, transformative experiences and exemplification. Finally, Part 3 is devoted to domain-specific inquiries about understanding, such as logical proofs, particle physics and moral understanding. Understanding and Conscious Experience will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in the philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics and phenomenology.

Provides a workable notion of the kinds of skills and capacities that are central for those who work in the arts.

Philosophy long sought to set knowledge on a firm foundation, through derivation of indubitable truths by infallible rules. For want of such truths and rules, the enterprise foundered. Nevertheless, foundationalism's heirs continue their forbears' quest, seeking security against epistemic misfortune, while their detractors typically espouse unbridled coherentism or facile relativism. Maintaining that neither stance is tenable, Catherine Elgin devises a via media between the absolute and the arbitrary, reconceiving the nature, goals, and methods of epistemology. In Considered Judgment, she argues for a reconception that takes reflective equilibrium as the standard of rational acceptability. A system of thought is in reflective equilibrium when its components are reasonable in light of one another, and the account they comprise is reasonable in light of our antecedent convictions about the subject it concerns. Many epistemologists now concede that certainty is a chimerical goal. But they continue to accept the traditional conception of epistemology's problematic. Elgin suggests that in abandoning the quest for certainty we gain opportunities for a broader epistemological purview--one that comprehends the arts and does justice to the sciences. She contends that metaphor, fiction, emotion, and exemplification often advance understanding in science as well as in art. The range of epistemology is broader and more variegated than is usually recognized. Tenable systems of thought are neither absolute nor arbitrary. Although they afford no guarantees, they are good in the way of belief.

Philosophy of education has an honored place in the history of Western philosophical thought. Its questions are as vital now, both philosophically and practically, as they have ever been. In recent decades, however, philosophical thinking about education has largely fallen off the philosophical radar screen. Philosophy of education has lost intimate contact with the parent discipline to a regrettably large extent--to the detriment of both. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education is intended to serve as a general introduction to key issues in the field, to further the philosophical pursuit of those issues, and to bring philosophy of education back into closer contact with general philosophy. Distinguished philosophers and philosophers of education, most of whom have made important contributions to core areas of philosophy, turn their attention in these 28 essays to a broad range of philosophical questions concerning education. The chapters are accessible to readers with no prior exposure to philosophy of education, and provide both surveys of the general domain they address, and advance the discussion in those domains in original and fruitful ways. Together their authors constitute a new wave of general philosophers taking up fundamental philosophical questions about education--the first such cohort of outstanding general philosophers to do so (in English) in a generation.

This is the first book dedicated to the topic of epistemic autonomy. It features original essays from leading scholars that promise to significantly shape future debates in this emerging area of epistemology. While the nature of and value of autonomy has long been discussed in ethics and social and political philosophy, it remains an underexplored area of epistemology. The essays in this collection take up several interesting questions and approaches related to epistemic autonomy. Topics include the nature of epistemic autonomy, whether epistemic paternalism can be justified, autonomy as an epistemic value and/or vice, and the relation of epistemic autonomy to social epistemology and epistemic injustice. Epistemic Autonomy will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy.

How can we “know”? What does “knowledge” mean? These were the fundamental questions of epistemology in the 17th century. In response to continental rationalism, the British empiricist John Locke proposed that the only knowledge humans can have is acquired a posterior. In a discussion of the human mind, he argued, the source of knowledge is sensual experience – mostly vision. Since vision and picture-making are the realm of art, art theory picked up on questions such as: are pictures able to represent knowledge about the world? How does the production of images itself generate knowledge? How does pictorial logic differ from linguistic logic? How can artists contribute to a collective search for truth? Questions concerning the epistemic potential of art can be found throughout the centuries up until the present day. However, these are not questions of art alone, but of the representational value of images in general. Thus, the history of art theory can contribute much to recent discussions in Visual Studies and Bildwissenschaften by showing the historic dimension of arguments about what images are or should be. “What is knowledge?” is as much a philosophic question as “What is an image?” Visual epistemology is a new and promising research field that is best investigated using an interdisciplinary approach that addresses a range of interconnected areas, such as internal and external images and the interplay of producer and perceiver of images. This publication outlines this territory by gathering together several approaches to visual epistemology by many distinguished authors.