Topics Language

Question What is understanding? How do we know when something is really understood? If I get up in front of 200 people and read a speech written by a great nuclear physicist flawlessly, yet without knowing what it is I'm talking about, have I understood what I'm reading?

Accepted:
August 23, 2006

Comments

It sounds to me as if you've answered (at least part of) your own question -- if you don't know what you're talking about when you read the speech aloud, then how could you be said to understand it? Suppose you're a native English speaker and you don't know any other languages. A French speaker could write out, perhaps phonetically, a sentence in French and you could practice reading that sentence aloud until you could read that sentence flawlessly, but that won't make you understand it. Whatever understanding is, you would lack it.

Perhaps in the case where you read the speech about nuclear physics aloud, there are many words that you understand, and perhaps even whole sentences. But for any part of the speech that you are functioning essentially as a parrot -- where you voice something without knowing what it is you're talking about -- you lack understanding.

Question What is understanding? How do we know when something is really understood? If I get up in front of 200 people and read a speech written by a great nuclear physicist flawlessly, yet without knowing what it is I'm talking about, have I understood what I'm reading? Accepted:August 23, 2006

Question What is understanding? How do we know when something is really understood? If I get up in front of 200 people and read a speech written by a great nuclear physicist flawlessly, yet without knowing what it is I'm talking about, have I understood what I'm reading?

Accepted:
August 23, 2006