Synthese (2014) 191:945–959DOI 10.1007/s11229-013-0322-0

Lucky understanding without knowledge

Yasha Rohwer

Received: 23 July 2011 / Accepted: 6 June 2012 / Published online: 29 August 2013© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract Can one still have understanding in situations that involve the kind of epis-temic luck that undermines knowledge? Kvanvig (The value of knowledge and thepursuit of understanding, 2003; in: Haddock A, Miller A, Pritchard D (eds) Epistemicvalue, 2009a; in: Haddock A, Miller A, Pritchard D (eds) Epistemic value, 2009b)says yes, Prichard (Grazer Philos Stud 77:325–339, 2008; in: O’Hear A (ed) Epis-temology, 2009; in: Pritchard D, Millar A, Haddock A (eds) The nature and valueof knowledge: three investigations, 2010) say sometimes, DePaul and Grimm (PhilosPhenomenol Res 74:498–514, 2007) and Grimm (Br J Philos Sci 57:515–535, 2006;in: Bernecker S, Pritchard D (eds) The Routledge companion to epistemology, 2011),Kvanvig’s critics, say no. The cases put forth by Kvanvig’s critics share a commonfeature, which seems to drive the intuition that understanding can’t be lucky: the factthat the information that makes up the individual’s understanding comes exclusivelyfrom a bad source. I formulate a case that lacks this feature, drawing on the fact thatunderstanding produced from scientific inquiry is often produced by collaboration.I argue that my case provides good evidence that understanding is not a species ofknowledge.

Keywords Understanding · Knowledge · Luck · Jonathan Kvanvig ·Duncan Pritchard · Stephen Grimm · Michael DePaul

1 Introduction

Jonathan Kvanvig has recently argued that understanding does not imply knowledge(2003). For Kvanvig, while both understanding and knowledge imply true belief, the

Y. Rohwer (B)Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Oregon Institute of Technology,3201 Campus Dr., Klamath Falls, OR 97601, USAe-mail: yasha.rohwer@oit.edu

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central features of knowledge and understanding are different. The central featureof understanding is “the grasping of relations between items of information” (2003,p. 197), while the central feature of knowledge “involves nonaccidental connectionsbetween mind and world” (2003, p. 197). Hence, certain sorts of epistemic luck under-mine knowledge. However, according to Kvanvig, understanding is immune to beingundermined by luck. Understanding can be lucky.

Even more recently, Prichard (2008, 2009, 2010) has argued that understandingcan be lucky. However, unlike Kvanvig, Prichard thinks understanding is immune toonly one kind of knowledge-undermining epistemic luck: the kind of luck that “isentirely due to the fact that one is in an epistemically unfriendly environment” (2010,p. 78). An example of this kind of epistemic luck can be found in the classic barncase, where the individual is looking at a real barn but happens to be in barn façadecountry.

DePaul and Grimm (2007), and Grimm (2006) argue, contra Kvanvig and Prichard,that understanding can be undermined by the same kinds of luck that undermineknowledge. That is, there must be “a non-accidental relationship between the internalgrasping and the external connection grasped” (2007, p. 513). If DePaul and Grimmare correct, then any account of the nature of understanding will need as a necessarycondition something that rules out the undermining epistemic luck. This condition willresemble the ‘forth condition’ in accounts of knowledge that take as their starting pointjustified true belief. Furthermore, if DePaul and Grimm are correct that understandingrequires a non-accidental relationship between world and mind, then understandingwill have all the essential ingredients for knowledge and therefore most likely be aspecies of knowledge.

The cases put forth by DePaul and Grimm (2007) and Grimm (2006) and Prichard(2008, 2009, 2010) are certainly compelling; however, these cases all have a particularfeature in common: the true beliefs that in part make up the individual’s understandingcome exclusively from a bad source. In this paper, I will argue that this feature drives theintuition that understanding cannot be lucky. This leaves unexplored cases where thebeliefs that make up an individual’s understanding come from multiple sources, somegood and some bad. I will focus on the scientific understanding of the natural worldthat is produced via unification, since in science, understanding is often furnished bymultiple sources. This “unifying understanding” is gained when a seemingly disparatenew true belief is integrated into an already connected set of true beliefs. If the factthat the beliefs that make up an individual’s understanding come exclusively from abad source is driving the intuitions that understanding can’t be lucky, then it shouldbe possible to construct a case that lacks this feature but produces the intuition thatthere is understanding. I will present such a case to show that understanding affordedby multiple sources—some good, some bad—can be lucky. Understanding is not,therefore, a species of knowledge.

2 Kvanvig’s and Prichard’s cases for lucky understanding

For Kvanvig, understanding, unlike knowledge, can be lucky. That is, the kind of luckthat can undermine knowledge does not effect whether or not someone understands.

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Since Kvanvig wants to argue that understanding does not imply knowledge, he onlyneeds one case where one has understanding but not knowledge. Kvanvig’s case asksus to consider someone’s historical understanding of the Comanche dominance of thesouthern plains of North America. Say we ask this individual many questions aboutComanche dominance and she answers them all correctly. She is not guessing. She ishonestly answering the questions using stored information that she believes to be true.According to Kvanvig, her ability is “surely constitutive of understanding, and theexperience of query and answer, if sustained for a long enough period of time, wouldgenerate convincing evidence that the person in question understood [Comanche dom-inance]” (2003, p. 198). Kvanvig next asks if the person has knowledge of Comanchedominance. While it may seem so, we find out that the information came from a bookthat was selected at random from a stack of texts, of which the vast majority were filledwith inaccurate information. Therefore, it was just a matter of luck that she chose theright book. So, according to Kvanvig, since the case fits standard cases in the Gettierliterature—namely the fake barn cases—she doesn’t have knowledge. But she doesunderstand.

Prichard (2008, 2009, 2010) presents two cases with similarities to Kvanvig’scase—one with a bad source and one with a good source. His first case involvesan individual who—at the scene of a fire—is enquiring why the house burned down.The individual asks someone in front of the house who is dressed as a fire officer. Theperson dressed as a fire officer tells the individual that the reason the house burneddown is because of faulty wiring. It may now seem as if the individual both knows andunderstands why the house burned down. However, Prichard adds a twist. Assume thatthe person dressed as a fire officer was not a real fire officer but was dressed as onebecause he was on his way to a costume party. Further assume that the fake fire officerhad no idea why the fire started and merely guessed the cause of the fire correctly.Although the enquiring individual has a true belief, Prichard asserts that she certainlydoes not have knowledge, nor does she understand why the house burned down. AsPrichard says, “one cannot gain an understanding of why one’s house burnt down byconsulting someone who, unbeknownst to you, is not a real fire officer but insteadmerely someone in fancy dress” (2010, p. 78).

However, according to Pritchard, this does not mean that understanding is notimmune to all knowledge-undermining luck. Take the burning house case again. Imag-ine that there are many people dressed as fire officers in front of the burning house.Further assume that only one is really a fire officer—the rest are on their way to afancy dress party. Suppose that the enquiring individual asks the real fire official,who informs her that the house burned down because of faulty wiring. This case isanalogues to the famous barn cases, so according to Prichard our inquiring individ-ual does not know why the house burned down. However, Prichard thinks that theindividual does understand why. According to Prichard, The enquiring individual hasthe required true beliefs and the individual acquired the understanding of why thehouse burnt down in the right sort of way—asking an actual fire officer. Pritchardclaims, “one can gain a genuine understanding of why one’s house burned down viathe testimony of a genuine fire officer, even if there is environmental luck in play”(2010, p. 79). So understanding can be lucky; however, only when the luck is merelyenvironmental.

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3 Cases against lucky understanding

DePaul and Grimm (2007), and Grimm (2006) put forward some cases against theclaim that understanding can be lucky. Grimm (2006) further argues that the caseswhere understanding is, in fact, not undermined by luck, are cases of epistemic luckthat do not undermine knowledge. For Grimm, understanding and knowledge standand fall together in the face of epistemic luck. Therefore DePaul and Grimm (2007),and Grimm (2006) are committed to defending the universal claim that understandingalways implies knowledge, and so they need to show that Kvanvig’s and Prichard’sabove counterexamples are not really counterexamples.

DePaul and Grimm (2007) put forward the following case: imagine that you getyour World Cup results from a news reporter who makes up all his scores. Youhave no reason to not trust him; you think his reports are quite trustworthy. Thereporter announces that the US beat Italy 2-1 and that the winning goal was scoredbecause the Italian goalie slipped in the mud. You come to believe that the win-ning goal was scored because Italy’s goalie slipped in the mud. And, as it turnsout, the reporter’s made up report has in this case described everything correctly.According to DePaul and Grimm, although you do grasp the relation between thewinning goal being scored and Italy’s goalie slipping in the mud, you still do notunderstand why the winning goal was scored. You could have so easily been mis-taken. Therefore, according to DePaul and Grimm, “just as it is hard to see howgenuine knowledge of the world can be based on a tissue of lies, so too is it hard tosee how genuine understanding of the world can be based on such a tissue” (2007,p. 513).

Grimm (2006) puts forward the following case: imagine Albert who, unbeknownstto him, has been slipped a drug that causes him to have a hallucination. Albert “sees”his dog bump into the table causing a vase to fall and break. Although this was ahallucination, the events hallucinated exactly matched up with the actual events thatunfolded. According to Grimm, although Albert might think he understands why thevase broke, he does not genuinely understand.

At this point it might seem that there is no disagreement between DePaul andGrimm and Prichard since Prichard would agree that in all of these cases thereis no understanding. However, as we will see in a moment, Grimm (2006) evenreexamines Kvanvig’s case and thinks that it does not show that understanding canbe lucky; rather, according to Grimm, it shows that knowledge and understand-ing stand or fall together. Grimm (2006) makes the same kind of distinction asPrichard (2008, 2009, 2010) between two kinds of luck. He notes that one mightbe lucky in acquiring a set of internally grasped true beliefs either because of a badsource or a bad environment. Prichard (2008, 2009, 2010) characterizes the kind ofluck that results from a bad source as “Gettier-style luck”. Gettier-style luck inter-venes to break the connection between the grasping of connections and that whichis grasped (e.g. the fake fire officer drives a wedge between the grasping of thecausally related pieces of information—there was faulty wiring and it caused thefire—and the fact that the faulty wiring did indeed cause the fire). Environmentalluck, according to Prichard, does not have this feature. There is no intervening; theluck is merely the result of the environment one is in. An example of a bad source

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or Gettier-style luck is a pathological liar who, on one occasion, gets things right.An example of a bad environment is a room almost entirely full of pathologicalliars.

Both Gettier-style luck and environmental luck are, as Pritchard claims, kinds ofveritic epistemic luck in that “it is a matter of luck that the agent’s belief is true” (2005,p. 146). This diagnosis helps us get a grip on what makes it the case that a belief islucky. As Pritchard claims, an agent’s belief will not be epistemically lucky if “one notonly forms a true belief in the actual world, but that in most nearby possible worldswhere the relevant initial conditions for that belief are the same as in the actual world(e.g. where the agent forms her beliefs in the same way as she did in the actual world),the agent also forms a true belief in the target proposition” (2005, p. 151).1 So if Iform my belief from the testimony of a bad source, the pathological liar, it will belucky because in nearby possible worlds my belief will be false since normally liarsdon’t stumble on the truth. And if I form my belief from the testimony of the onegood source in room full of pathological liars it will be lucky since in nearby possibleworlds I would have asked one of the liars and therefore ended up with a false belief.All the discussed cases are nicely captured by this account of epistemic luck and wecan see why the true beliefs are lucky since in the nearby possible worlds where theprocedure is followed the individual ends up with a false belief.

According to Kvanvig, acquiring your information from a bad source or in a badenvironment or both does not undermine understanding like it undermines knowledge(2009a). However, for Pritchard, understanding,2 unlike knowledge, is immune to thekind of luck that is caused by being in a bad environment. Grimm (2006) disagreeswith both claims.

First Grimm returns to Kvanvig’s case to argue for how understanding is under-mined by a bad source. Say the book about the Comanche dominance of the southernplains was written by a person who got his information by doing terrible research. Butall the facts are correct. Hence, the book from which you received all your true beliefsabout Comanche dominance, came from bad source, and so is itself a bad source.According to Grimm, bad research shows that “the author of the theory doesn’t gen-uinely understand why the Comanches dominated the southern plains. And if theauthor doesn’t understand this, it is very hard to see how the reader of the textbookcould understand in turn” (2006, pp. 525–526). Grimm’s judgment about this case isthe same as Prichard’s judgment of his fire case where the information about the firecomes from a person who is dressed as a fire officer for a fancy dress party, but is notactually a fire officer.

Grimm then goes on to agree with Kvanvig (and thus with Prichard) that if the sourceis good but the environment is bad, understanding is possible. That is, if your book isa good source (thoroughly researched) but it was plucked from a bin filled with booksthat are all otherwise wrong, understanding is possible. However, Grimm disagrees

1 This kind of account of epistemic luck is called a safety account (Orozco 2011). It is by no means anuncontested account. For example, see Lackey (2006) for some problems with the account. However, Iwill adopt it as a good working definition since it allows me to be precise in explicating the counterfactualrelations that render the beliefs lucky in my case.2 It should be noted that Pritchard’s focus is on understanding why.

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with Kvanvig—and therefore Prichard—about the lack of knowledge. According toboth Prichard and Kvanvig, the environmental luck undermines knowledge but notunderstanding. And both are making this judgment based on the idea that in the barnfaçade cases the person fails to know that what is before them is a real barn. However,Grimm notes that this is not a universal judgment.

For example, Hawthorne (2003) discusses a case where he randomly gave sixchildren books where only one named the correct capital of Austria. When asked toname the capital of Austria, only one child answers correctly. According to Hawthorne,when people are presented with this case and asked how many children know the capitalof Austria, they reply “one” (2003). According to Grimm, “Hawthorne’s judgmentabout the case seems very plausible; it seems right to credit the child with knowledge”(2006, p. 528). What this shows, for Grimm, is that knowledge, like understanding,seems possible in a bad environment as long as the source is good. So, if Hawthorneand Grimm are correct, it would seem that knowledge and understanding stand andfall together when it comes to the two kinds of luck. A bad source undermines themboth, but a bad environment combined with a good source is not a problem.

These cases, and Grimm’s reanalysis of Kvanvig’s case makes it seem that under-standing does in fact imply knowledge.

4 A source versus multiple sources: unifying understanding

In a more recent article and in a reply to critics, Kvanvig (2009a,b) focuses his accountof understanding on a particular kind of understanding—“objectual understanding”.The content of the attitude that makes up one’s objectual understanding, for Kvanvig,is “an object of some sort (person, theory, part of reality)” (2009b, p. 341). Exam-ples of objectual understanding given by Kvanvig are “[one] understands combustionor quantum mechanics or Republican ideology” (2009a, p. 95). Although Kvanvigfocuses on objectual understanding he retains the essential element of understanding,which are true beliefs and “the grasping of internal, structural relationships betweenpieces of information” (2009a, p. 100).3

To be sure, the cases put forth by DePaul and Grimm (2007) and Grimm (2006)would have been cases of objectual understanding had it not been for the luck, inthat the object of understanding would have been a part of reality. But what has beenoverlooked in this debate, both by Kvanvig and his critics, is that often a collaborativeprocess furnishes our understanding of reality. Today scientific research and expla-nation is fundamentally a collaborative endeavor. Many scientists work together toproduce understanding, each providing pieces of information that when taken togetherelucidate a puzzling phenomenon. So, often the beliefs that make up an individual’sunderstanding come from many different sources, and this is especially true in thecase of unifying understanding.

The literature on scientific explanation can help explicate what unifying understand-ing is. Salmon (1998) is interested in understanding as one of the intellectual benefits

3 Kvanvig also mentions justification as a necessary condition for understanding. However, since the focusof this paper is on whether understanding can be lucky, I will not discuss these further conditions.

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that are afforded to us by scientific explanation. And while it is commonly acceptedthat scientific explanations produce understanding (Achinstein 1983; Friedman 1974;Grimm 2006, 2011; Kitcher 1981, 1989; Lewis 1986; Lipton 1991; Salmon 1984, 1998;Woodward 1993), Salmon is interested in how explanation produces understanding.He notes one popular theory of scientific explanation is explanation as unification(Kitcher 1989).

Explanation as unification produces understanding of phenomena by, as Salmonnotes, “[fitting] them into the general scheme of things, that is, into the scientificworld-picture” (1998, p. 87). Of course, to get true understanding, the world picturemust be correct so as to meet the condition of facticity.4 Kitcher (1981), drawing onFriedman (1974), helps fill out Salmon’s quote. Kitcher notes that unification providesunderstanding by “[reducing], in so far as possible, the number of types of facts wemust accept as brute” (1981, p. 529).

It might be thought that the object of unifying understanding is the universe atlarge. As Salmon states when discussing the ideal gas laws, “our understanding of theuniverse was immeasurably increased by this unification of a variety of phenomenaby means of such a simple and limited basis” (1998, p. 86). While it is true that ourunderstanding of the universe grew, this is an implication of understanding particularphenomena—say the behavior of many particular gases—with a single framework.Hence, the object of unifying understanding is particular phenomena but, once theyare understood, this implies a better understanding of the whole natural world.

Here is a quick example of unifying understanding where the understanding isachieved through a collaborative process. Imagine that a fossil of an extinct speciesnew to science is discovered. At first the fossil is quite puzzling; the paleontologist doesnot know what it is, or how it fits into the tree of life. However, after sending the fossilto certain specialists it turns out, as each specialist gets back to our paleontologist, thatthe fossil has properties A, B and C but not property D. Taken together, this informationshows that it must be a new species of proboscidean—an order composed of elephant-like animals. This discovery of the new fossil and the subsequent identification ofthe fossil as a new species of proboscidean requires that the paleontologist integratethe new species into the phylogeny of proboscideans and grasp the similarity relationsbetween the different species. Hence, a new true belief—that the fossil belongs to a newspecies of proboscidean—is integrated into a set of already connected true beliefs aboutthe proboscidean order and the new belief’s connections to old beliefs are grasped.This furnishes the paleontologist with understanding of the fossil, in that by integratingthe new species of proboscidean into the order they gain a better understanding of thenew fossil. This understanding, along with their old beliefs, implies that they gain abetter understanding of the proboscidean order.

This route to objectual understanding is different from all the cases that are putforth as counterexamples to lucky understanding where the beliefs and connectionsgrasped come exclusively from one source—“the vase broke because the dog bumpedinto the table” comes from the drugged perception of the individual, “the winning goalwas scored because the Italian goalie slipped in the mud” comes from the sportscaster

4 Not everyone thinks that the beliefs grasped need to be true (Elgin 2004). I will not address that issuehere.

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who makes up all his results, “the house burned down because of faulty wiring”comes from the clueless fake fire officer and “the Comanches dominated the southernplains…because their economy was based on a barter system” comes from the badresearcher (Grimm 2006, p. 525).

One might balk at the idea that understanding of the new fossil has actually occurred,because all that has occurred is a classification. That is, understanding of x is onlyhad when one is in possession of an explanation of x; all understanding of the nat-ural world is based on explanation. Although explanations are certainly the paradigmexamples of things that afford understanding, it does not seem correct to identifyunderstanding with explanations. Rather, we should identify understanding with theintellectual benefits that explanations provide such as the fitting of phenomena into thegeneral scheme of things (unification). Anything that provides these benefits shouldthus provide understanding, whether or not it is an explanation.

One reason to balk at the identification of understanding with the possession ofexplanations is that it would neglect the role of highly idealized models in science,models where falsehoods have been intentionally introduced (Weisberg 2007). In biol-ogy, highly idealized models such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Sober and Wilson 1998)and the Hawk–Dove model (Maynard Smith and Price 1973; Maynard Smith 1982)assume things that are not true of the target population, such as infinite populationsize, random pairing of players and asexual reproduction, but which are necessary tomake inferences about the target population. These models themselves surely provideunderstanding of the target populations, but they are not explanations if a necessarycondition for being an explanation is that it be true (Hempel 1965; Strevens 2009;Woodward 2003). If this analysis is correct, then understanding is possible even whenthere is no explanation.

Lipton (2009) also gives some compelling examples where explanation and under-standing come apart. Lipton (2009), like Salmon (1998), identifies understanding withthe intellectual benefits (e.g. “true beliefs about unification”5) that are often providedby explanations. However the explanation is just one means to these intellectual ben-efits, and it is the intellectual benefits that are sufficient for understanding. So what isneeded is a case where unification is achieved without an explanation. To demonstratehow we can get unification and therefore understanding without explanation, Liptondraws on Kuhn’s (1970) account of the workings of normal science, in particular thepervasive use of exemplars.

Exemplars provide information about how different phenomena are related andtherefore how the world fits together. However, exemplars don’t accomplish this viaexplanation; rather, the “similarity relations that the exemplars support provide a tax-onomy that gives information about the structure of the world. They thus have theeffect of unifying the phenomena and so providing understanding, and they do thisby analogy, not by explanation” (2009, p. 53). And this is exactly what is going onin the proboscidean example. One might worry about referencing Kuhn because heis an anti-realist, but, as Lipton rightly points out, “the idea that we may unify the

5 Lipton takes understanding to imply knowledge. So, I am slightly modifying what he says, focusing onthe link he identifies between exemplars and understanding, since ultimately this paper denies the idea thatunderstanding implies knowledge.

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phenomena (and so improve our understanding of them) by constructing schemes ofclassification that do not in themselves provide explanations is compatible with a con-ventional realist conception of science” (2009, p. 54). If Lipton is correct, then it isincorrect to think that understanding necessarily implies explanation.

Here is a quick case to drive this point home. Imagine that there are two individuals,Brooke and Jason, whose belief sets are completely identical in terms of content andin terms of the connections between the beliefs in the sets. Suppose that within thesets there is some belief concerning an organism x. And this belief is connected toother beliefs and both grasp these connections, so that we can say that both Jason andBrooke have understanding of organism x and the degree to which they understandingorganism x is identical. Now let us add some connections to Brooke’s set but not toJason’s. That is let us say that Brooke correctly realizes that organism x is a token of aspecies type Z. So Brooke has correctly classified organism x, and in so doing his setof beliefs has become more unified. If unification does not provide understanding thenwe should say that Brooke’s understanding of organism x is still identical to Jason’s,but that seems mistaken.

As I noted above, the cases used by DePaul and Grimm and Pritchard to supportthe claim that understanding always implies knowledge are certainly compelling. Andin each case, what undermines both the possibility of understanding and knowledgeis a bad source or what Pritchard calls Gettier-style luck. But I think that what makesthe cases so compelling is that the true beliefs and grasped connections between themthat would compose an individual’s understanding are all from the bad source. Thatis, everything that is supposed to make up the individual’s understanding—how thecausal process functions, and what would happen if one were to manipulate the causalprocess—is from a bad source. But, often, as in the example of the new species ofproboscidean, scientific understanding doesn’t work this way. If it is the fact that whatmakes up the understanding comes only from a bad source that drives the intuitionthat objectual understanding is incompatible with Gettier-style luck, then it should bepossible to construct a case without this feature but with Gettier-style luck that doesnot have the intuitive pull the above cases against lucky understanding have. And,therefore we will have good evidence that—contra Grimm—understanding is not aspecies of knowledge. I construct such a case in the next section.

5 Unifying understanding from many sources and knowledge

As I said before, unifying understanding is often a group effort. Imagine a group ofspace-adventuring geneticists go to a new planet to sequence the genes of the plantsfound there. The plants have spectacularly diverse phenotypes; hence the geneticistsbelieve that there are many different types of plants on the planet. However, a patternemerges once they start sequencing the genomes of the different species of plants. It isdetermined that there are at least ten types of plants (there may be more, but as of nowonly ten have been discovered), which they boringly name: type A, type B, type C,type D, type E, type F, type G, type H, type I and type J. Suppose that merely lookingat the particular phenotypes of the plants does not allow the scientists to identify whattype a species belongs to. Rather it is the genetic properties of the plant that allows

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for identification—hence the scientists construct genetic exemplars. Also, assume thatyou have to look at the entire sequence to determine type (no partial sequence willconfirm type).

Sequencing a genome is a long and arduous process, so the geneticists divide upthe task; each is in charge of part of the genome of each new plant. A new speciesof plant is discovered, and the geneticists get to sequencing. All of the geneticistsexcept one do their work normally. The one exception is a newly arrived geneti-cist, who is lazy and always makes up her results about what genetic properties her“sequencing” revealed. As it turns out, the lazy geneticist guesses correctly and theplant has the properties she claims to have uncovered by her “sequencing.” Basedon the collected information, the group determines that the plant is of type C. Eventhough one geneticists was lazy but lucky, it seems that the other members of thegroup do have a better understanding of the new species of plant and in turn the floraof the new planet, in that they have successfully integrated another true belief—thatthe plant is of type C—into an already possessed set of true beliefs, and grasped theconnections between the new belief and the set. However, the correct classification,and therefore unification, does not rest exclusively on a bad source. In the classifi-cation process there is, as Lipton (2009) highlighted, the use of an exemplar, whichis constructed out of previous good work from good sources. The exemplar, herea list of genetic properties for each type, taken together with the information fromthe bad source and the good sources, leads to the belief that the plant is of type C.It therefore also leads to new connections between beliefs about the new plant andpreviously held beliefs about other plants of that type. (E.g. type C plants might begenerally poisonous to livestock or apt to die in cold temperatures.) So, what makesup the understanding of the new plant is not exclusively from a bad source, as inthe cases given by Kvanvig’s critics. Consequently, if my diagnosis of those cases iscorrect, we should have the intuition that although the belief that the plant is of typeC was lucky in that there was intervening luck, the geneticists’ understanding of theplant has grown and by implication so has the understanding of the flora of the newplanet.

But knowledge of the new plant species has not occurred, nor has the knowledgeof the flora of the new planet grown. The reason for this is that because, as stressed byDePaul and Grimm (2007), Grimm (2006) and Prichard (2008, 2009, 2010), knowl-edge is always incompatible with Gettier-style luck—true beliefs that come from abad source. We can use Pritchard’s definition of veritic epistemic luck to show whythe belief necessary for the understanding of the new plant is indeed lucky. In mostnearby possible worlds the other geneticists will all acquire a false belief as to whattype of plant the new species is since the method they use to form the belief relies onthe testimony of the bad geneticist. And in most nearby possible worlds she woulddeliver different information since she is using a random process to deliver the infor-mation. Since all properties of the plant are necessary to identify the plant, if she hadreported a different property the other geneticists would have incorrectly believed thatthe new plant was of a different type. So the belief is clearly lucky and importantly theepistemic luck is flowing from a bad source. So the lazy lucky geneticist is a classickind of bad source that serves to corrupt the information used to determine that thenew species is of type C, thereby precluding the possibility of knowledge.

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This case give good evidence that unifying understanding is compatible withGettier-style luck, and suggests that Kvanvig was right, that understanding is notmerely a species of knowledge.

It might be thought that if the scientists would not have detected false consequencesof an incorrect report from the lazy geneticist, then it is unclear that they actually gainunderstanding of the new plant. The potential worry is that if in nearby worlds thecounterparts of the scientists (who have false beliefs since in those worlds the lazygeneticists turned in bad results) would not eventually detect those false consequences,then the scientists in the actual world would be error-prone, and so could not possiblygain understanding. Or if they do eventually detect the false consequences, then thebeliefs of the scientists in the actual world are not lucky.

In the case presented, there is no reason to think that the counterparts would noteventually discover the false consequences by, for example, seeing implications thatdon’t hold for the type the plant is supposed to be (e.g. it is eaten by livestock but theydon’t get sick). So, the scientists in the actual world are not error-prone. However,this fact does not render the belief unlucky. The belief remains lucky because thecounterparts’ initial belief, at the time in question, is false and the method used bythe scientists and their counterparts in nearby worlds is the same: they rely on thetestimony of the lazy geneticist whom they have no reason to suspect. The fact thatthe counterparts in the nearby world eventually lose the false belief in the future bydetecting false consequences does not change the fact that the counterparts originallyhad a false belief. Following Pritchard’s (2005) analysis of luck, that is all that isnecessary for the belief of the scientists in the actual world to be true by luck at thetime in question.

Furthermore, I am not sure that the mere inability to detect false consequences, hadthe belief been false, affects the scientists’ actual understanding. For example, assumethat some scientists gain unifying understanding of a plant, but then the planet explodes.Had their belief been false, it would be impossible to detect false consequences. But thisfact does not seem to make it the case that they no longer have unifying understanding.If the inability to detect false consequences, had the belief been false, doesn’t affect acase where there is straightforward understanding, then it presumably does not affecta case of lucky understanding.

And it doesn’t seem to. A slightly modified version of the original case of luckyunderstanding shows this. Imagine that the case is identical but after the lazy geneticistturns in her information the world explodes, destroying all the samples of the plants.However, the geneticists escape with the information they gathered stored on theircomputers. The only difference between the actual world and nearby worlds is that inthe actual world the geneticists have a lucky true belief, while in the nearby worldsthe lazy geneticists turned in something else, so the geneticists’ counterparts havefalse beliefs. With the planet gone and all the plant samples gone, there would be noway for the counterparts in nearby worlds to detect false consequences. However, thispossible scenario surely doesn’t affect the scientists’ actual understanding even if itis lucky. Therefore, the inability to detect false consequences doesn’t seem to affectunderstanding.

It should be noted that this case take for granted an assumption of Grimm (2006)—that a bad source always undermines a possible instance of knowledge. This assump-

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tion is very intuitive; however, it might be thought that my case actually doesn’t showthat understanding can be lucky; rather, it shows that that Grimm’s assumption thatbad sources—that is, Gettier-style luck—always undermine knowledge is false. Thusthe geneticists not only expand their understanding of the flora but also their knowl-edge of the flora. While this is certainly a possible move, I take Grimm’s assumptionto be correct. However, if it is thought that the cases I present show that Grimm’sassumption is false, then perhaps my conclusion should really be a disjunction. Eitherunifying understanding does not imply knowledge or a bad source does not alwaysundermine knowledge. Again, I think that the first disjunct is true and the second false(and I will continue to operate on this assumption for the rest of the paper); if converseturned out to be true that would be a very interesting fact indeed!

6 What if the existing set of beliefs comes from a bad source?

Often understanding is gained by integrating a new and seemingly disparate beliefinto an already existent set of connected beliefs and grasping the connections betweenthe old and the new. I have assumed in my case that understanding occurs if someof the beliefs that make up the understanding come from good sources. But, whatif the preexisting set of true beliefs, including the all-important exemplar, and theirconnections come from a bad source, and a person takes a new true belief—also froma bad source—and integrates it using the previous beliefs and connections? I don’tthink that there would be unifying understanding in that case. This new case wouldparallel the above cases in that what makes up the possible objectual understandinghas come exclusively from bad sources. So the intuition that there is no understandingdoes indeed return.

This allows for a more rigorous examination of why it is the case that if the beliefsand connections all come from one bad source the person does not gain understanding,but when there is a mixture of good and bad sources, as in the space-adventuring geneti-cists case, they do. Prichard (2010) claims that understanding always involves cognitiveachievement—where the understanding (the success) is because of the agent’s abilityor skill. In Prichard’s fire case (2008, 2009, 2010), understanding is precluded becausethe true belief had nothing to do with the enquiring individual’s cognitive abilities orskills. Hence, there was no cognitive achievement and so, no understanding. He assertsabout the fire case, “the truth of the belief is not sufficiently creditable to his cognitiveability” (2010, p. 81).

However, in cases where the information is not exclusively from a bad source thereis plausibly some degree of cognitive achievement, since the understanding of thenew plant is partially supplied by the exemplar, and the exemplar was constructedout of previous good research on the part of the good-source geneticists. And thisinformation and the piecing of it all together are essential to forming the true beliefthat the new plant is of type C and thereby gaining understanding of the new plantspecies. All the lazy geneticist supplies are the purported genetic properties on whichthe classification can be made. Hence, the fact that the other geneticists have the truebelief that the new plant is of type C partly because of their cognitive abilities or skillsmakes the case stronger that they do indeed gain understanding of the new plant. As

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Pritchard claims, “one gains understanding by undertaking an obstacle-overcomingeffort to piece together the relevant pieces of information” (2010, pp. 82–83), andthis seems like what the geneticists are doing. And Prichard’s quote links up nicelywith what Kvanvig asserted was the central feature of understanding: “the grasping ofrelations between items of information” (2003, p. 197).

So, the connected set of beliefs into which new belief is integrated must be madeup of, if not knowledge, then at least good information from good sources. That is,unifying understanding occurs when a seemingly disparate new true belief is integratedinto a set of knowledge (or information from good sources). This should not come asa surprise since in the lazy geneticist case the preexisting set of beliefs were acquiredappropriately, by good work.

Does this mean that unifying understanding implies knowledge? Part of what makesup the scientists’ understanding of the flora of the new planet—the set of true beliefsinto which they integrate their new belief—is knowledge. Hence, it might seem as ifunderstanding does imply knowledge. This is not the case, though. In integrating thenew belief the geneticists gain unifying understanding of the new species of plant.But do not gain knowledge. Of course, their understanding of the flora of the newplanet certainly does imply knowledge, since it is in part composed of knowledge (thepreexisting set of true beliefs). But that is not a surprise; knowledge implies knowledge.What is important to recognize is that while their understanding of the flora of the newplanet grows, their knowledge of the new flora does not. So, unifying understanding,by itself, does not imply knowledge.

This raises another potential problem. Imagine an individual with a set of con-nected true beliefs that were acquired appropriately and hence count as knowledge.Then, this person integrates a new true belief into that set that came from a badsource. They have understanding of the new true belief even though they don’thave knowledge of it, and while their understanding has grown their knowledgehas not. Now imagine that bad-source true beliefs keep coming and that the indi-vidual continues to integrate them. Does this individual’s understanding continue togrow? After a while it does not seem like it. The reason for this is because the setof beliefs into which the new belief is integrated no longer consists primarily ofgood-source true beliefs; hence, at a certain point the possibility of having a cogni-tive achievement stops. Therefore, this shows that the set of integrated true beliefsinto which the seemingly disparate new belief is integrated must be, for the mostpart, constituted of good source beliefs. Even if it is hard to pin down what theexact ratio must be, there is still a threshold that when crossed undermines unify-ing understanding.

I now want to consider a different version of the lazy geneticist case. Imagine thatthe lazy geneticist doesn’t just make up one result and get it right, but makes up 100results and only gets one right. One might argue that the geneticists don’t actuallyunderstand in the 99 wrong cases, so why think they do understand in the one casewhere she gets it right? They do gain understanding of the one plant that is typedcorrectly because in that case the seemingly disparate information can be integratedinto their already existent set of appropriately formed true beliefs. Of course, peoplecan think they understand a lot of things and be mistaken.

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7 Conclusion

Bringing similar debates from different disciplines of philosophy to bear on oneanother can be instructive for both. And that is exactly what we see here. Lookingat the literature on scientific explanation has proven to be helpful when thinking aboutthe nature of understanding. Doing so helped identify one way understanding canbe produced that has not been examined in the current literature on the nature ofunderstanding. Thinking of cases where the understanding is facilitated by multiplesources—as it so often is in unifying understanding—has helped construct a plausiblecase that shows, I have argued, that understanding can be lucky and, therefore, doesnot imply knowledge. If this is correct, then a pervasive idea in the philosophy of sci-ence literature is incorrect: the assumption that understanding implies knowledge. Ina recent edited volume entitled “Scientific Understanding” (2009) almost every articlejust takes understanding to imply knowledge without any argument for it.

In the debate over the nature of understanding, the cases against Kvanvig all rely oncases with a particular feature—the beliefs that make up the individual’s understandingcome exclusively from a bad source. I have argued that it is this feature that gavethe counterexamples to Kvanvig’s account their intuitive force. Focusing on unifyingunderstanding, I have constructed a case that lacks this feature and therefore shows thatunderstanding can be resistant to Gettier-style luck whereas, as even Grimm (2006)admits, knowledge is not. While I have focused on unifying understanding I do notwant to claim that only unifying understanding can be resistant to Gettier-style luck.These results can be generalized, however, one case of lucky understanding is sufficientto show that understanding is not a species of knowledge.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Matthew McGrath for very helpful comments and suggestionson multiple drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpfulsuggestions and Zachary Ernst and André Ariew for helpful discussion

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