Understanding Necessarily and Understanding Actually

In this paper, I consider the relationship between coming to understand why something must be the case and coming to understand why it actually is the case in some particular instance. Peter Lipton uses the possibility of coming to understand a phenomenon via a necessity proof as an argument that there can be understanding with no explanation. Lipton’s argument has come under criticism, at least partially because one might think that understanding why something must be the case has a different object from understanding the actual phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that that under certain circumstances it is fairly straightforward to come to understand an actual phenomenon on the basis of knowing why it had to be the case. Rather than relying on brute intuitions, my primary strategy will be to show that on least some modern accounts of understanding we can validate Lipton’s general point with respect to a variety of possible necessity relations.