Scientific Understanding

Understanding is an ability manifested by grasping relations of a phenomenon and articulating new explanations. Hence, scientific understanding is inextricably intertwined with and not possible without explanation, and understanding is not a type of propositional knowledge. Anna Elisabeth Höhl provides a novel philosophical account of scientific understanding by developing and defending necessary and sufficient conditions for the understanding that scientists achieve of the phenomena they are researching. This account of scientific understanding is based on and supported by a detailed investigation of an episode from scientific practice in biology.

Anna Elisabeth Höhl, born in 1992, is a philosopher of science and works as a project coordinator at the institute of philosophy at Leibniz Universität Hannover. After degrees in physics, history and philosophy of science, she did her doctorate at Universität Bielefeld as a member of the DFG-funded Research Training Group »Integrating Ethics and Epistemology of Scientific Research«. Her research focusses on topics in general philosophy of science and she approaches abstract questions through detailed analyses of concrete episodes from scientific practice.