That was one of the many topics debated on by leading philosophers from the U.S. and China at the New York-China Epistemology Conference held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus from Oct. 18 to 20.

Their talks covered a variety of topics, including “Intuition, Understanding, and Self-Evidence,” “Imagination and Understanding,” and “Can Closed-Mindedness be an Intellectual Value?” And the scholars who delivered them were just as diverse. Among them were U.S. philosophers from schools including Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as Chinese scholars from highly ranked universities like Peking, Fudan, and Nanjing.

“A Model of International Cooperation”

Their lectures explored the research of past philosophers and their own. About half of the presentations were accompanied by commentary from their peers. For example, after an MIT professor spoke about “Higher Order Evidence and the Perspective of Doubt,” a Chinese epistemologist critiqued and reflected on her work.

“I was hoping that the conference would lead to deep and lively exchanges about issues of common concern in epistemology [the study of knowledge, particularly with regards to its validity and scope], and I’m delighted to say it did,” said Stephen Grimm, Ph.D., Fordham’s philosophy department chair. “I was also hoping the conference would provide a model of international cooperation between our countries—and on that score too, it exceeded all my expectations.”

To Assert or Not to Assert?

One of the Chinese philosophers was Weiping Zheng, a scholar from Xiamen University. His topic was “Norms of Assertion and Chinese Speech Wisdom,” which explored the rules that allow us to state a fact or a belief, what kinds of assertions we should make and shouldn’t make, and how ancient Chinese wisdom can help us evaluate what we should say before we actually say it.

One rule of assertion, he said, is that we should only assert things that are true. Zheng argued that this rule is too restrictive. Some assertions may be true, but morally wrong.

“For example, [let’s say] I am dying. And you say [to me], you are dying. You are epistemically right, because it is true that I am dying. But you think it is morally right [to say this]?” he asked. “That’s why I want to find hierarchy of different norms of assertion.”

One way to help you make morally sound assertions, he continued, is by following a Confucian concept called Li—an ancient Chinese form of wisdom.

“It’s part of [this] wisdom that we’re gonna be virtuous, good, kind, proper, and all of these things. We’re thinking of that as the thing we’re always supposed to be answerable to,” explained Jane Friedman, a philosophy professor at New York University, who also delivered a lecture at the conference. “Whereas if all you have is a rule that says, ‘Yeah, if something’s true, it’s okay to say it’ … I think part of what he wanted to drive home was no, of course that’s not fine. We need another kind of principle governing what we’re allowed to say and when. The place to look to is this notion of Li in Chinese philosophy.”

This includes using discretion in speech, said Zheng, using solid evidence when making assertions, and keeping virtue in mind while speaking.

“It does seem like an interesting guide and a way of thinking in a more holistic way about the practice of asserting things,” Friedman said. “I like thinking about this general idea of wisdom, what that might entail, and how it might be a guide to what I should say and when.”

You may think you know what your name is, how many toes you have or who is buried in Grant’s tomb.

But what if, in fact, there exists a godlike Evil Genius who has manipulated everything you think you know? The Evil Genius downloads facts into your mind, paints a landscape you perceive as your home and deceives you into believing that you exist in a world of people. But in reality, you subsist in a dream world that the Evil Genius has created.

So how do you know you really know what you know?

The answer that Stephen Grimm, Ph.D., gives: Why are we asking this question?

Grimm, an assistant professor of philosophy, has spent his career as an epistemologist—a philosopher who studies knowledge—pushing the boundaries of the discipline. For centuries, Grimm said, epistemologists have focused on basic questions about knowledge, hoping to craft a theory that can withstand skeptics such as 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, the author of the Evil Genius problem.

But in doing so, these epistemologists have overlooked important questions.

“A lot of epistemology since Descartes has been focused on defending our beliefs, to show that we have knowledge of ordinary things—knowing that you have a hand or that there’s a chair in the room,” he said. “What we miss are broader concerns about, say, what it takes to understand the world or to achieve wisdom.”

So while other epistemologists asked questions such as “What does it take for a belief to be justified?” and “How much evidence is required until I know something?” Grimm proceeded to the next step. In his doctoral dissertation, “Understanding as an Epistemic Goal,” he began to explore what he maintains is the more important concept—understanding, which focuses not on the what or whether, but rather, the why and how.

“Understanding as a mental act is different than assenting or believing. It’s grasping how things are connected,” he said. “Often you’re driven by a question about why things are the way they are. It starts with puzzlement or curiosity.”

Understanding, he continued, is a higher-level cognitive process that falls within the broader category of knowledge. While the person who has knowledge of a thing might simply hold a collection of discrete facts about it, someone who understands will be able to see how these facts relate to one another and to the larger picture they compose. A kind of “zoomed-out” view of the world, understanding allows its possessor to see the web and not merely the threads.

In his quest to understand understanding, Grimm has explored other branches of philosophy. He has done extensive work in the philosophy of science, a field that has long dealt with higher cognitive concepts.

“Philosophers of science have always been interested in what it takes for a scientific explanation to be a good explanation,” he said. “And part of what makes an explanation good, presumably, is the understanding it generates in the scientist.”

Moreover, as epistemology turns away from its exclusive focus on knowledge and moves toward the bigger questions, epistemologists might be able to draw from the philosophy of science to refine the concept of understanding.

According to Grimm, the benefits of such work would reach beyond philosophy. Becoming clearer on how humans understand can later help unify our understanding into a comprehensive picture of the world—an insight that would particularly serve universities, which house many types of knowledge and, hence, understanding.

“We don’t just want our students to get isolated bits of knowledge, but also we don’t just want them to get isolated bits of understanding—one kind of understanding that comes out of your study of economics, one kind that comes out of your study of literature,” he said. “One question I find very intriguing is how these various kinds of understanding might be integrated into a unified picture of what the world is like, what our place in the world is and what the place of God is in the world.”

Grimm is working to put his research and writing into action through a grant proposal he intends to call “Varieties of Understanding.” If successful, the grant would gather representatives from a wide range of disciplines to ask what it means to understand in a variety of contexts. The proposal, which is in its early stages, would foster the broader understanding that Grimm said universities should aspire to achieve.

In the meantime, though, his efforts continue to evolve within the field that for millennia has been concerned with these higher concepts.

“Contemporary epistemology has often lost sight of what we really desire as intellectual beings, which is, in my view, to understand the world, or to make sense of it,” Grimm said “We want to see how the world hangs together, how it works.”