Kareem Khalifa, "Understanding, Explanation and Scientific Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
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How did Kareem Khalifa’s background in mathematics lead him to philosophy of science?
Uh hello, Karim Khalifa. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Hello,
Kerry. Thanks for having
me. It's uh I'm looking forward to our conversation about understanding, explanation, and scientific knowledge. Before we get to the actual topic of the book and the and the contents of the book, maybe you can tell us a bit about yourself, um, you know, how you came to philosophy and how you got interested in the topics that you work in and and how you came to write the book. Oh, sure
thing. So uh my background is primarily well well, my my undergraduate background started in mathematics and in particular in applied mathematics. And I think from a very early uh acquaintance, like I remember having this experience when I first learned um uh Newtonian mechanics, I sort of encountered what uh Wigner would call the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. I I felt that really acutely. I thought to myself, here are these well regimented scribbles uh that somehow represent things like forces and so on and so forth. Uh and I thought that that was really kind of puzzling and amazing on some level. Um And I I felt that even more acutely in my undergraduate training where I started off with a a special focus on applied mathematics and the social sciences, where um the the the effectiveness is actually not so clear.
Um the unreasonableness becomes maybe more salient. Uh and so as I started uh sort of kicking the tires on this with uh with people who are s either social scientists or mathematicians, they told me, you know, these are really philosophical questions and that should be where you turn. And so that's uh that's sort of how I got interested in in philosophy, uh, very roughly. Uh And I guess uh uh how I got interested in particular in in topics of understanding and explanation, it was sort of uh fortuitous. I uh I got really interested in explanation uh just in in the course of my graduate studies and in particular how it differs across different sciences. Uh and was also very interested particularly in sort of epistemological questions, uh such as uh topics such as inference to the best explanation and things like that.
And just as I was completing my my dissertation, uh this literature on uh understanding started popping up and I thought to myself, well, a lot of the stuff that I looked at looks like it it has answers to this stuff just under it uh a different name. Uh and that that was really how I uh how I started. And so one of the first publications I had on this was called uh Inaugurating Understanding a Repackaging Explanation, which was basically saying, like, hey, we've done all this already. Uh and uh to some extent that's been uh a guiding theme in my work on understanding is that we we have a a pretty good epistemology of explanation that ends up solving a lot of the the current sort of uh problems that we have uh with respect to understanding.
Uh good. Okay, well uh yeah, understanding an explanation. I mean that's kind of I that's the basic debate in this neck of the woods is, you know, w is understanding something different from explanation or is it uh is it a particular form of explanation? Can you kind of, you know, talk us talk to us about the general um the general lay of the land in terms of what uh what the main debate or debates are about. Um
great question. So uh I have sort of my own potted history which I I tend to tell with this. Uh I don't know that everyone would agree with this, but it's it's hopefully not too far from how a lot of people working in the field would work, which is basically there's a much longer history uh of explicitly philosophizing about explanation. I think uh for for we philosophers of science, Carl Hempel Hempel is sort of the uh the the the forefather of that particular branch of philosophy of science, uh where essentially what you're trying to do is come up with uh a suitable philosophical analysis of scientific explanation. And of course, there's been many variations of that since then. And you'll find a few remarks in Hempel where he either says things that are actually quite critical of understanding because of his uh his background as as a broadly illogical positivist, thinking that it was overly psychological.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Kareem Khalifa’s background in mathematics lead him to philosophy of science?
0:07–7:59
2
What is the traditional ‘received view’ of understanding as knowledge of an explanation?
7:59–14:13
3
How does Khalifa’s EKS model (consideration‑comparison‑commitment) explain degrees of understanding?
14:13–21:00
4
Why can we understand a scientific theory that is later shown to be false, like the phlogiston theory?
21:00–28:34
5
What role do counterfactual reasoning and scientific ‘seeing’ play in improving understanding?
28:34–35:36
6
How does the luck‑argument challenge the relationship between understanding and knowledge?
35:36–43:16
7
What is ‘objectual understanding’ and how does it relate to explanatory understanding?
43:16–50:35
8
How might collective or collaborative understanding work in large scientific projects?
50:35–57:32
Speakers
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