ABSTRACT
Is it possible to have understanding without belief? Recently, it has been argued that understanding is a form of knowledge, and so must comprise justified true belief and some way to guarantee against Gettier conditions (Grimm 2006). While there has been much debate over the precise relation understanding bears to truth (e.g. Kvanvig 2003; Mizrahi 2012), even those who would argue that understanding does not require the same sort of factivity as knowledge would grant that it must bear some important connection to the truth: Catherine Elgin, an opponent of there being a tight link between understanding and facts, still grants that “[p]retty plainly, understanding somehow answers to facts. The question is how it does so” (Elgin 2007, 33). Denials of the link between understanding and knowledge most often focus on the Gettier condition, denying that understanding can be undermined by the same sort of Gettier-luck that undermines knowledge (e.g. Kvanvig 2003; Brogaard 2005). However, there is both intuitive (Grimm 2006) and empirical (Wilkenfeld, Plunkett, and Lombrozo, under review) reason to doubt that one can drive a wedge between understanding and knowledge on the basis of their susceptibility to Gettier concerns. Most recently, Alison Hills (2015b) has argued that understanding does not require justification, as justification can be undermined by defeaters (e.g. reliable testimony) that do not undermine the underlying understanding. We argue that all of these approaches concede too much to those who would claim that understanding is a mirror of what traditional accounts say knowledge is like. We argue that, unlike with traditional knowledge, understanding does not even require full belief. We will put forward two central arguments for this claim. First, we will argue that the variants of the reasons Hills gives for thinking there can be understanding without knowledge also show how there can be understanding without belief. Second, we will construct a case that we claim exhibits understanding without believing, and attempt to defend the claim that it really does so.
