ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines another intuitive requirement on understanding: its accuracy requirement. It is argued that the notion of a proposition being central to the understanding of a phenomenon is crucial to the elucidation of the accuracy requirement and a detailed account of what it takes for a true proposition to be central in that sense is offered. This account is shown to have plausible consequences and to be, when the context-sensitive nature of understanding is taken into consideration, in accordance with the claim that understanding comes in degrees. Based on the elucidation of the accuracy requirement of understanding and on the considerations put forward in Chapter 3, this chapter offers a systematic account of explanatory understanding and examines whether knowledge of the propositions that are central to the understanding of a phenomenon is necessary for understanding. It is shown that propositional knowledge and understanding have, in fact, different epistemic profiles due to their respective sensibility to epistemic luck and that, therefore, knowing the propositions that are central to the understanding of a phenomenon is not required to secure an understanding of that phenomenon.
