ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 investigates the nature of the grasping requirement of understanding. While it is reasonable to think that understanding depends on the justification one has for holding certain beliefs, it is also clear that understanding why something is the case involves more than being justified in believing certain propositions concerning the explanatory story of a phenomenon. In particular, to understand a phenomenon based on an explanation of that phenomenon, a subject must grasp the content of the explanation in the required way. She must, so to speak, see how the explained phenomenon depends, according to the explanation, on the elements cited in that explanation. Based on earlier proposals made by Newman, Chapter 3 provides a defense of a view which elucidates this requirement in terms of a specific kind of inferential knowledge; knowledge which is then shown to bear important similarities to practical knowledge.
