Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Understanding
Summary
Understanding is a cognitive process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to use concepts to model that object.
Understanding is a relation between the knower and an object of understanding. Understanding implies abilities and dispositions with respect to an object of knowledge that are sufficient to support intelligent behavior.
Understanding is often, though not always, related to learning concepts, and sometimes also the theory or theories associated with those concepts. However, a person may have a good ability to predict the behavior of an object, animal or system—and therefore may, in some sense, understand it—without necessarily being familiar with the concepts or theories associated with that object, animal, or system in their culture. They may have developed their own distinct concepts and theories, which may be equivalent, better or worse than the recognized standard concepts and theories of their culture. Thus, understanding is correlated with the ability to make inferences.
Understanding and knowledge are both words without unified definitions.
Ludwig Wittgenstein looked past a definition of knowledge or understanding and looked at how the words were used in natural language, identifying relevant features in context. It has been suggested that knowledge alone has little value whereas knowing something in context is understanding, which has much higher relative value but it has also been suggested that a state short of knowledge can be termed understanding.
Someone's understanding can come from perceived causes or non causal sources, suggesting knowledge being a pillar of where understanding comes from. We can have understanding while lacking corresponding knowledge and have knowledge while lacking the corresponding understanding. Even with knowledge, relevant distinctions or correct conclusion about similar cases may not be made suggesting more information about the context would be required, which eludes to different degrees of understanding depending on the context.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.