Puzzlement as a Guide to Understanding

In this paper, I draw attention to a familiar yet overlooked epistemic state: puzzlement. We experience that by which we are puzzled as being in some way incomprehensible to us. Puzzlement is thus distinct from the mere absence of understanding. It is a polar rather than privative opposite of understanding. The distinction between puzzlement and the mere absence of understanding, I go on to argue, raises a novel problem for reductive analyses of understanding in terms of knowledge.