Understanding understanding

Imagine you have been feeling unwell lately and ask your doctor for advice. When she makes a diagnosis, you usually trust her judgement. But why do you do so? Among other things, because you take her to be more competent than you are. Her being more competent is not just a matter of being more knowledgeable, i.e., of knowing more bits of information. It is also a matter of having a broader and deeper understanding. Your doctor understands the structure and functioning of the human body better than you do. But what does your doctors understanding amount to? What do we mean when we claim that your doctor, or anybody else, understands why your blood pressure is low, or why you are feeling exhausted lately? What does it mean to understand something a phenomenon, event, or domain of reality? If understanding something is not only a matter of knowing many things about it, what does it require? The overarching aim of this book is to understand understanding, i.e., to provide an answer to these questions. Instead of asking what understanding amounts to, the author starts with a different question: what does it look like, to fail to understand? Which problems or shortcomings are incompatible with understanding and must be amended for understanding to be achieved? This perspective of inquiry sheds light on a fundamental aspect of understanding: understanding is crucially a matter of bringing information to fit into ones already established worldview. When we understand something, we experience a sense of equilibrium. What we believe, accept, or endorse about reality is in balance. However, is a worldview in equilibrium all there is to understanding? The author argues that it is not. The information about the spread of the COVID-19 might fit perfectly into a worldview of someone committed to an empirically debunked conspiracy theory. Yet nobody would say that a conspiracy theorist understands how COVID-19 is spreading. Whether we understand reality or not is not just a matter of how coherent our worldview is; it is also a matter of how well our worldview is tethered to reality. Which tether is most suitable for understanding? The author argues that a certain amount of truth is necessary for understanding to succeed. However, understanding does not reduce, as many philosophers have thought, to the mere psychological side effect of a true explanation. Explanation, it turns out, is only one of many possible paths leading us to understanding. The doctor you asked for advice will not just give you some new pieces of knowledge; with luck, she will help you understand your health situation. But how exactly do we share understanding with others? Is understanding a good that, like knowledge, can be transmitted from one person to another? The author argues that understanding not only can be transmitted, but probably also generated, through verbal interactions. Someone can put others in the position to understand, even if she does not understand herself.