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Making Sense of Understanding: A Pragmatist Account of Scientific Understanding https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.108244 Westerblad, Oscar Chang, Hasok Scientists strive to understand the world. Traditionally, philosophers of science have thought that this is a matter of constructing explanations, based on theories and laws, thereby gaining understanding of phenomena by explaining them. This thesis takes a radically different approach, instead relating the notion of understanding to the *activities* that scientists perform. Scientific understanding is not just a matter of representing or explaining the world, but a matter of practical and intelligent *doing*. Philosophers of science have continued to sell short the project of making sense of scientific understanding, limiting their views to the articulated and well-formed products of inquiry, like theory and explanation. In taking a pragmatist approach to the epistemology of understanding, I reorientate our theorising about understanding from products to processes, and from explanations to methods and concepts. I thereby provide an ecumenical account of scientific understanding that can accommodate the dynamics and heterogeneity of scientific practice. In Chapter 1, I argue against the dominant focus on explanatory understanding in philosophy of science, thereby making room for my own account of operational understanding. Chapter 2 provides an account of how concepts are essential constituents of understanding. Concepts frame entities so that scientists can think and talk about and interact with them intelligently. Chapter 3 gives an account of understanding-how, through my notion of operational understanding, which relates to the methods that structure and guide successful performances of activities. In Chapter 4, I take up the task of describing the *psychology* of understanding, the kind of *state* that understanding is, which I argue is accounted for in terms of *skill*. In Chapter 5, I develop an account of how cognitive devices — tools for thinking, like models and thought-experiments — facilitate and produce understanding. University of Cambridge 2023-09-30 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng Cambridge Trust, Cambridge International Scholarship. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/367790 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/fc38ed7d-c2a8-43ac-935f-f6274d34b6dd/download 69e0d41d582e20f7600632b3aa6d31f9 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/895eca4e-feeb-49cb-bceb-cf6fc2aa6686/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/ intelligibility philosophy philosophy of science pragmatism science scientific understanding understanding