Michaela McSweeney

When Americans watched video footage of the Vietnam War, it helped many of them come closer to actually grasping the horrors of war for the first time. And this is so even though many of them already believed that war was horrific. We grasp when we have a phenomenal experience of something while simultaneously being able to cognize it (or think about it intellectually). I give an account of the nature, value, and function of grasping. I argue that grasping is among our ultimate epistemic ends as human inquirers. I then show that grasping is important both theoretically and concretely. For example, theoretically: my account helps resolve a longstanding tension between analytic philosophy and the rest of the humanities about the extent to which knowledge is subjective. Concretely: my account helps explain why AI will likely never achieve what humans do and should epistemically value.