Rational Understanding

This work offers a new way of linking three central concepts in epistemology: justification, understanding, and knowledge. Rather than examining each on its own, it provides groundwork for treating them as parts of one connected whole.

The argument rests on two moves. First, the author contends that a particular account of doxastic justification, meaning the justification of beliefs a subject actually holds, is the best starting point for asking how a subject can come to understand reality. Second, the usual order of analysis between understanding and knowledge is reversed: knowledge itself is best explained in terms of a specific kind of understanding.

The book is aimed at researchers and advanced students in epistemology and the philosophy of science. An Open Access version is available at taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license.