The project Catherine Elgin embarks on in her latest book, True Enough, is expansive and ambitious. The book shares its title with a 2004 paper of Elgin's, and both take inspiration from the role—apparently epistemic—in science played by idealizations and other falsehoods. But, whereas the earlier paper focuses on motivating a particular view of scientific understanding on that basis, this book is a wide-ranging project in epistemology. I interpret it as including three main parts: (1) advocating for the epistemic significance of understanding in the place of knowledge and a corresponding weakening of the requirement of true belief, (2) developing a coherentist epistemology that replaces the externalist requirement of reliability with internalist responsibility, and (3) showing how artistic representation is of a piece with scientific representation and other epistemic achievements.
The first of these relates most directly to debates in philosophy of science and the interests that brought me...
