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.”

Funded by a $4.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the Varieties of Understanding project came to a close on June 24 with the capstone conference drawing multidisciplinary international scholars to the Lincoln Center campus. The three-year project has underwritten research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and theology on the question of how we understand the world.

The scholars who participated in the project have collectively generated significant research in their respective fields, Grimm said. Ten books were accepted or published by major printing presses, including Oxford University Press and Harvard University Press, and 52 journal articles were published or accepted in journals, including Nous, Cognition, Child Development, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Faith and Philosophy, and Philosophical Studies—with more than 40 more articles currently under review.

“We have helped found a new field of inquiry, the study of understanding,” said Grimm. “This vibrant new field has led to more inquiry, more discussions, more debates, all of which are helping to increase our understanding of understanding itself.”

Grimm produced four papers for the project and will continue his research this fall as a visiting fellow at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. Among his research interests are two different kinds of understanding: one by which we “grasp” the world, and another that the world presents to us.

“One of the capstone speakers, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, said that you read well when you let the novel or the poem grasp you—you’re not trying to grasp it or tinker with it. You’re being receptive to it, looking to see what it is pointing out to you,” Grimm said.

“There are some kinds of knowledge that we ‘grasp,’ such as the causal structure of the world. But then there are things like literary understanding that is more receptive and attentive. That’s a different kind of understanding.”

The Limits of Understanding

Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson’s plenary talk, “How We Talk!” cautioned against becoming overconfident in our capacity to understand. She focused on academia’s use of scrupulously precise and reductionistic language, which she said gives an air of communicating truth.

Language, though, is “complex and endlessly open to new complications,” she said, “more like a brilliant companion of humanity than its creation.”

“It’s like living with a creature, like a cat or something. You begin to find out it has its own ways of operating, that you can’t coerce it or control it,” she said. “We know language is alive, because it can be lifeless. It dies in captivity.”

Language is taken captive when academia—particularly social sciences, Robinson said—clings to jargon for the sake of being precise. Often, that precision becomes conflated with truth, leading us to overestimate just how much we actually understand about a given subject. Respecting the complexity and vitality of language keeps us intellectually humble, she said.

A Multi-University Effort

The $3.56 million Templeton grant and more than $640,000 in supplemental funds were used to distribute approximately $2.6 million in subawards to fund new research on the psychology, theology, and philosophy of understanding. Twenty projects were selected from nearly 400 proposals.

Tania Lombrozo, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; Michael Strevens, PhD, professor of philosophy at New York University; and Gordon Graham, PhD, the Henry Luce III Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at Princeton Theological Seminary directed the distribution of awards for psychology, philosophy, and theology, respectively.

Lombrozo directed empirical and theoretical research out of her Concepts and Cognition Lab at the University of California, Berkeley on the psychology of human understanding. Her team conducted a survey of how people generally view the ability of science to understand. Most people, the team found, believe that science is limited to empirical data.

In other words, science is useful for elucidating the world around us, but it fails when it comes to explaining phenomena such as romantic love or religious beliefs.

For a full description of the project, visit the Varieties of Understanding website.

Kramer, a prizewinning composer and Distinguished Professor of English and Music, argues in his new book The Thought of Music (University of California Press, 2016) that music is not just an expressive outlet, but a legitimate mode of thinking about the world.

The book is the final installment in a series of three, which includes Interpreting Music (2010) and Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (2012).

“The volumes together seek to answer three fundamental questions,” Kramer said. “First, what does understanding music consist of? Second, what does understanding music tell us about the character of humanistic understanding in general? And finally, what kind of knowledge does such understanding produce?”

The Thought of Music examines how we think about music and how we think by means of music, questions that Kramer said harken back to Beethoven’s definition of music as “thinking in tones.” Beyond being a means of expression, music can function as a way of thinking about critical human issues such as memory, language, pleasure, rationality, and sexuality, which are just some of the topics addressed in the book.

Elucidating the role that music plays in human thought is particularly important for the field of musicology, the academic study of music. Through the trilogy, Kramer’s goal is to bring music—particularly classical music—into broader conversations within the humanities about ideas such as meaning, identity, society, and culture.

“In the book, the notorious fact that it is difficult to specify what music means becomes a positive force rather than a disability,” Kramer said. “Music [is an example]of the difficulties posed by humanistic knowledge—a form of knowledge that, beyond raw data collection, always involves cognitive uncertainty.”

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.”