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Seeking Understanding Through Reflection

Editors’ abstract The first part of Chen’s paper illustrates the fact that reasons contained in common sense serve an explanatory role fairly well for everyday living. The inadequacy of commonsensical explanations for abnormal cases, however, breeds the desire to seek a unified explanation for all cases. Philosopher-scientists, as Chen characterizes them, hold the conviction that such an explanation is offered by speculative theories, which are created by reflecting on the reasons contained in common sense and then weaving them into a systematic theory. The second part of the paper shows that the philosopher-scientists’ theoretical project is doomed in light of the achievement of modern science, for which success in constructing positive theories relies on technical concepts defined independently of natural understanding and languages. Seeing this might help philosophy reorient itself to conceptual investigation and reflection on experience, which in Chen’s view offer the unique form of knowing that has always been central to the philosophical tradition.