sophie

When thinking about Understanding, I have a difficult time explaining to myself what is understanding. I realise some things are just accepted as being understood, like dark and light, which are refrences to the conditions encountered during night and day.

To me I cannot understand darkness except if I experience darkness directly. There are other parts of life which need a lot of relational synthesis before I can understand what is it that specific part of life is about.

So when I say understand, what is it? does it mean?

ieyeasu

Hmm...

You know, I had the same though after reading Stranger in a Strange Land. What is it to grok?

The best I can come up with is that understanding is a state of being regarding another phenomenon as not creating further curiosity after a certain amount of study.

yguy

It means you knowingly stand under a truth higher than yourself or anyone else.

For instance, if you're an architect commissioned to design a house for somebody, and the customer looks at the plan and says it won't work, you ask why. If he says it's because he wants a bigger master bedroom, you understand that as the customer, his truth is higher than yours within the context of the contractual agreement.

Or on a moral level, I heard an interesting anecdote from a father one time. One of the siblings stole something from one of the others. When the dad asked if the kid thought it was OK to steal, the kid said "Yeah". At this, the dad told the other siblings help themselves to the belongings of the child-thief. When he objected, the dad pointed out that they were merely doing to him what he had done to one of them. This demonstrated to the child why thievery is wrong.

sophie

I thought this sort of activity would help to promote understanding.

http://www.notrich.org/SixthSense/figI10.bmp

jpbrooks

Understanding may involve knowing something about how a given thing works.

Luiseach

I view understanding as a multi-faceted experience.

As is rightly pointed out, we can have an empirical understanding of 'dark and light.'

We can add nuances to our understanding of the same phenomena, however, by realising that 'direct' experience is itself intersected, influenced and directed by our knowledge of other discourses which can add shades of meaning to raw perception - language, cultural values, politics, ideology, philosophy, science, art/literature/music, history, and so on.

So, yes, 'understanding' does indeed involve relational syntheses.

'Understanding' is not (indeed, cannot be) limited only by direct experience of external 'realities.'

An interesting question.

sophie

jpbrooks,

I read the essay, and you have communicated the difficulty in pinning down understanding. On a literary note, I thought the language simple enough except your use of the term proposition. Then you went on to explain propositions a little too late in the essay, I thought. Finally I came away with the idea that propositions were things about a subject matter which help to communicate the depth and breadth of the subject matter.

I think your propositions in its final intrinsic form, when they embed themselves in mind, should help to make things work in the head the way the things work outside the head. A copy of the world and how it operates.

I think I've grown.

jpbrooks

Sorry for missing your reply, sophie.

I'm glad that you were able to cull something useful from the essay, but I refuse to take credit for another person's work.
The essay that I cited above is part of a set of interesting essays on a variety of subjects written by Richard Garlikov.

sophie

I would say there are a few basis points on which understanding is based. Here are a few I have thought that are related to understanding.

• representation scheme
• adequate information
• rules of operation
• possible worlds (environment)
• usual implication

There has to be some scheme of representation otherwise there would be a vacuum of knowledge. The representation scheme represents adequate quantities of information otherwise there would be little understanding. The rules of operation are like the laws of science which we have discovered about our world. These rules of operation would be a subset of all the possible rules about our world. The possible worlds indicate the environments where we understand the understanding may be applicable. The usual implication of an understanding allows a casual relationship to be part of an understanding.

jpbrooks

Your list, though probably not exhaustive, does seem to include items that are necessary for there to be knowledge of some thing (object, phenomenon, etc.) at all. But (and this is one of the points alluded to in Garlikov's essay) do those items (considered collectively) constitute understanding? As the essay points out in the example about Feynman, one may come to understand a problem in a new way even though one does not have access to all of the "rules" that have been discovered relating to that problem.

I'm only raising the issue above in order to emphasize the general point that a good way to test the "model" of "understanding" above (and others like it) is to attempt to find examples that are exceptions to its criteria.