Social epistemology and the acquisition of understanding

Contemporary discussions of testimony in social epistemology have traditionally focused on how epistemic justication and especially propositional knowledge can pass from speaker to hearer. By contrast, objectual understanding – i.e. the kind of epistemic standing one attains when one understands a subject matter or body of information – has for the most part been ignored entirely in these debates. This is surprising, in part, because recent literature on epistemic value (e.g. Kvanvig 2003; Pritchard 2010; Riggs 2009) has witnessed increased attention to understanding and the kind of purely epistemic value it might have, and which knowledge by contrast lacks. If this line in the epistemic value literature is right, the acquisition of understanding in social epistemic practice should be at least as important a topic of study as the social acquisition of knowledge.