state university of new york press understanding understanding oct 2003

[...]... possible to limit discussion of understanding explicitly to the understanding of language Dummett took the view that “a theory of meaning is a theory of understanding without expressing a converse view Even so, his work on the theory of meaning tended to dwell in much greater depth on conditions for language capacity or mastery than on the much vaguer topic of conditions for understanding At times there... understanding of understanding: “our approach to the understanding of the nature of things of every kind should be one and the same; namely, through the universal laws and rules of nature.” This declaration by Spinoza ended in the most ambitious terms: “I shall, then, treat of the nature and strength of the emotions, and the mind’s power over them, by the same method as I have used in treating of. .. inner mental state of understanding French In the reading of Baker and Hacker, understanding is “akin to an ability.” In linguistic terms, “the question of how it is possible for a person to understand new sentences boils down to the question of how it is possible for a person to be able to do those things which manifest understanding, namely react to, use and explain the meanings of new sentences.”... all or part of their lives, and that this search has been framed in terms of understanding So here is one of the fields for possible understanding It is typically vague, in that we cannot say what kind of understanding is sought, in what context, or what kind of satisfaction it might bring There may be an association—some would say an illicit association—with a notion of purpose, where understanding. .. models of understanding are grounded in a capacity to grasp the sense of stories, in the same way that linguistic significance may be thought to be rooted in some wider type of symbolism Broad terms of art such as discourse (and the French récit) can blur the differences between stories, the language of stories, and the meanings in that language The understanding of stories, like the understanding of texts,... the place of understanding in the arts—there was to be none— but it may also have been too stipulative to be convincing (m) Mathematics as an object of understanding has sometimes seemed far too attractive The immediacy and certainty of geometrical understanding impressed Plato greatly Mathematics is an area that gives rise to an apparent matching of objects of cognition with styles or methods of cognition... central type of understanding or rather non -understanding has always been seen to apply to religions A set of practices and beliefs can be immunized against understanding within a code of mutually reinforcing terminology and symbolism Religions may seem to offer archetypal frameworks of rationality and explanation that may be inaccessible to each other There may even be intimations of obstacles to understanding. .. model for the understanding of a first.15 (And an understanding of another language is not a productive topic If I have never learned Chinese, then I cannot understand it, on the whole That sort of ignorance must be the most common and least interesting barrier to understanding. ) (i) It is controversial whether the understanding of a language is narrower or wider than the understanding of meaning or... Idea of Perfection, where she wrote of freedom as “a function of the progressive 26 UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING attempt to see a particular object clearly”—to understand—in a case where what “happens” is entirely private, within someone’s mind.14 (c) Once again, a linguistic model for understanding may seem applicable well beyond an understanding of oral or written languages An understanding of language... here includes the main types of objects of understanding, but that is a harmless enough assumption for the sake of continuing discussion A more tendentious claim would be that some of these categories can be collapsed into some—or even one of the others in a reductionist fashion This would be most evident with the extreme example of Spinoza, just cited For him, all objects of understanding were to be regarded . MASON understanding understanding STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS SP_MAS_i-viii 8/13/03 10:05 AM Page iii Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2003 State University of New York All rights. writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Fran Keneston Library of Congress. particularly, following Plato, in terms of ranking “higher” and “lower” forms of understanding. The attraction is obvious: to set up a model of an ideal type of understanding, of which other types may then