Understanding?

In the MIT Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science, the following sentence opens the text entry for explanation. “An explanation is a structure or process that provides under-standing.” In this entry, understanding is clearly related to explanation. This is not contradictory to what could be said of an expert that understands things, so it may be worth following this idea further. A Dictionary definition of understand found in Microsoft Bookshelf (Chambers Dictionary) defines understand in terms of being able to grasp with the mind, comprehend, to be able to follow the meaning of etc. It also continues by stating that understand is to be expert in and to have knowledge of. This also fits well with the established link between understanding and expertise.

The text on explanation discusses various proposals for what explanation actually is. A deductive reasoning approach to explanation shows that an explanation can be provided by following logical reasoning paths. For instance, the explanation for an eclipse of the sun can be found from deducing this from the laws of planetary motion. This also means that future eclipses can be predicted, giving confidence that this explanation is correct. Other ways of describing explanation rely on cause and effect and the derivation of general rules that can be applied to specific cases. The discussion also shows that explanation may need to rely on identifying the best theory from competing theories used to explain things. For instance, one explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs was a meteorite impact on earth. However there are other theories that also seek to explain the extinction of dinosaurs. The relationship between understanding and explanation is not clearly stated in the encyclopaedia of cognitive science. It may mean that if one can explain something then this is what understanding it is all about. How could anyone understand something without being able to explain it? However, I am not convinced that just because the two terms are linked in this way that this implies their common meaning. The dictionary definition refers to mental comprehension, to knowledge and to expertise. It also states that understanding is to know the meaning. These statements, as one would expect from a dictionary, are not as precise and therefore not as easy to challenge as the more detailed academic explanation.

Elsewhere on this site I intend to discuss understanding again and consider it within the context of knowledge structure and learning dependency. I will by doing this, attempt to provide a different but probably sympathetic definition for understanding that does not rely on reference to the term explanation.