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Understanding and Equivalent Reformulations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Josh Hunt
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Abstract

Reformulating a scientific theory often leads to a significantly different way of understanding the world. Nevertheless, accounts of both theoretical equivalence and scientific understanding have neglected this important aspect of scientific theorizing. This essay provides a positive account of how reformulation changes our understanding. My account simultaneously addresses a serious challenge facing existing accounts of scientific understanding. These accounts have failed to characterize understanding in a way that goes beyond the epistemology of scientific explanation. By focusing on cases in which we have differences in understanding without differences in explanation, I show that understanding does not reduce to explanation.

Type
Explanation
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 5 , December 2021 , pp. 810 - 823
Copyright
Copyright 2021 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

†

For comments, I thank Gordon Belot, Kareem Khalifa, Laura Ruetsche, and Elise Woodard. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant DGE 1256260).

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