True Enough

True Enough - The MIT Press

Hardback (27 Oct 2017)

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Publisher's Synopsis

The development of an epistemology that explains how science and art embody and convey understanding.

Philosophy valorizes truth, holding that there can never be epistemically good reasons to accept a known falsehood, or to accept modes of justification that are not truth conducive. How can this stance account for the epistemic standing of science, which unabashedly relies on models, idealizations, and thought experiments that are known not to be true? In True Enough, Catherine Elgin argues that we should not assume that the inaccuracy of models and idealizations constitutes an inadequacy. To the contrary, their divergence from truth or representational accuracy fosters their epistemic functioning. When effective, models and idealizations are, Elgin contends, felicitous falsehoods that exemplify features of the phenomena they bear on. Because works of art deploy the same sorts of felicitous falsehoods, she argues, they also advance understanding.

Elgin develops a holistic epistemology that focuses on the understanding of broad ranges of phenomena rather than knowledge of individual facts. Epistemic acceptability, she maintains, is a matter not of truth-conduciveness, but of what would be reflectively endorsed by the members of an idealized epistemic community-a quasi-Kantian realm of epistemic ends.

Book information

ISBN: 9780262036535
Publisher: The MIT Press
Imprint: The MIT Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 121.6
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: xi, 337
Weight: 582g
Height: 160mm
Width: 236mm
Spine width: 28mm