understand/understanding |
Working Definition:
Understanding is the thoughtful way in which we cope with (configure situations in) everyday life. It is largely tactic and usually communicated through configurations. It is contrasted to knowledge.
Disciplinary Definitions:
See Verstehen in Dilthey's terms.
Comments:
I use the term configure as a translation of Verstehen.
Notes
Feyerabend (Against Method) writes:
"An anthropologist trying to discover the cosmology of his chosen tribe and the way it is mirrored in language, in the arts, in daily life . . . , first learns the language and the basic social habits; he inquires how they are related to other activities, including such prima facie unimportant activities as milking cows and cooking meals; he tries to identify key ideas. His attention to minutiae is not the result of a misguided urge for completeness but of the realization that what looks insignificant to one way of thinking (and perceiving) may play a most important role in another. . . Having found the key ideas the anthropologist tries to understand them. This he does in the same way in which he originally gained an understanding of his own language, including the language of the special profession that provides him with an income. He internalizes the ideas so that their connections are firmly engraved in his memory and his reactions, and can be produced at will. 'The native society has to be in the anthropologist [& ethnographer] himself and not merely in his notebooks if he is to understand it.' This process must be kept free from external interference. For example, the researcher must not try to get a better hold on the ideas of the tribe by likening them to ideas he already knows,* or finds more comprehensible or more precise. On no account must be attempt a 'logical resonstruction'. Such a procedure would tie him to the known, or to what is preferred by certain groups, and would forever prevent him from grasping the unknown ideology he is examining. Having completed his study, the anthropologist carries within himself both the native society and his own background, and he may now start comparing the two. The comparison decides whether the native way of thinking can be reproduced in European terms (provided there is a unique set of 'European terms'), or whether it has a 'logic' of its own, not found in any Western language. In the course of the comparison the anthropologist may rephrase certain native ideas in English. This does not mean that English _as spoken independently of the comparison_ is commensurable with the native idiom. It means that languages can be _bent_ in many directions and that understanding does not depend on any particular set of rules. The examination of key ideas passes through various stages, none of which leads to a complete clarification. Here the researcher must exercise firm control over his urge for instant clarity and logical perfection. He must never try to make a concept clearer than is suggested by the material (except as a temporary aid for further research). It is this material and not his logical intuition that decides about the content of the concepts. . . . he must keep his key notions vague and incomplete _until the right information comes along_, i.e., until field study turns up the missing elements which, taken by themselves, are just as unclear as the elements he has already found. (250-251)
Check:
[Cf. Gadamer on the distinction between understanding and knowledge.]
jjs
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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