 Answers to these questions tend to home in on properties either of the content or of the cognizer. For example, there is a long tradition in the philosophy of science on the nature of scientific explanation. In this tradition, explanations provide understanding by communicating knowledge of causes (Lipton 1991; Salmon 1984; Khalifa &amp; Gadomski 2013; Turri 2015b). By contrast, epistemologists, especially virtue epistemologists, have tended to argue that understanding is a special status that arises from acts of intellectual virtue. For instance, Pritchard (2016b) argues that understanding arises from “seeing it for oneself”, which manifests the virtue of intellectual autonomy. Stephen Grimm (2006) argues that understanding is a special kind of knowledge that arises from “grasping”, a distinctive psychological act that manifests intellectual virtue. Carter and Gordon (2014a,b) argue that objectual understanding, in particular, has a special value knowledge lacks, and further that this kind of understanding is needed in order to explain why certain traits, such as open-mindedness, are intellectual virtues. And on Zagzebski’s view, understanding is closely tied to mastery of an art or skill, does not pertain to discrete propositions but to patterns or systems, and consequently takes a nonpropositional object. Understanding does not result from mere acquisition of information, as can propositional knowledge. She thinks of understanding as “the state of comprehension of nonpropositional structures of reality” (Zagzebski 2001: 242). She also conjectures that we can define understanding analogously to how she defined knowledge. The main difference would be in the relevant virtues that produce the different states. Whereas knowledge derives from virtues that aim at truth, understanding derives at least partly from different virtues, special ones hitherto “unanalyzed, even unrecognized” (Zagzebski 2001: 248).