Understanding, truth, and explanation

Psychiatric Explanation and Understanding

Jaspers’s binary distinction between understanding and explanation has given way fi rst to a proliferation of explanatory levels and now, in John Campbell’s recent work, to a conception of explanation with no distinct levels of explanation and no inbuilt rationality requirement. I argue that there is still a role for understanding in psychiatry and that is to demystify the assumption that the s...

Explanation and understanding.

The study of explanation, while related to intuitive theories, concepts, and mental models, offers important new perspectives on high-level thought. Explanations sort themselves into several distinct types corresponding to patterns of causation, content domains, and explanatory stances, all of which have cognitive consequences. Although explanations are necessarily incomplete--often dramaticall...

Truth, Scientific Understanding and Haugeland’s Existential Ontology

Inference to the best explanation: does it track truth?

In the form of inference known as inference to the best explanation (IBE) there are various ways to characterise what is meant by the best explanation. This paper considers a number of such characterisations including several based on confirmation measures and several based on coherence measures. The goal is to find a measure which adequately captures what is meant by ‘best’ and which also yiel...

Explanation-Based Learning for Image Understanding

Existing prior domain knowledge represents a valuable source of information for image interpretation problems such as classifying handwritten characters. Such domain knowledge must be translated into a form understandable by the learner. Translation can be realized with Explanation-Based Learning (EBL) which provides a kind of dynamic inductive bias, combining domain knowledge and training exam...