Understanding and the need for explanation

This is going to be a befuddled post…largely because I’m suffering from a cold and I’ve just come back from a lovely Mexican dinner with some lovely margaritas. But I was talking understanding to a prospective about understanding (I swear, Helen is never going to sit next to me again at dinner!) and was thinking about it on the way home and wanted to write things down before I forget it.

I’ve long long long held that understanding consists of three pretty important abilities: 1) the ability to see how different bits of stuff fit together in a consistent and coherent way; 2) the ability to offer explanations (accounts) of the thing you purport to understand; and 3) the ability to defend those explanations/accounts. But I’ve had problems trying to explicate the account further than this, other than motivating reasons why each component is a requisite part of understanding. But perhaps something like what follows may just work:

I think that I want to say that understanding, fundamentally, is the ability to see/grasp how different bits of stuff (knowledge? information? beliefs? must this ’stuff’ even be propositional?) fit together into a consistent and coherent whole. You see how the different bits interact with one another, how one thing causes another to be as it is, what would happen to the whole if one thing was removed, etc. (I’m picturing a car engine, but I think this would work with pretty much anything one can understand…a mathematical proof, the Battle of Normandy, Plato.) This, fundamentally, is what understanding consists of, and this mental grasping is, I think, a necessary condition. But it’s not sufficient.

When one has this grasp of the matter at hand; when she is able to see how the bits of information fit together and work together, then she is able to offer explanations about the matter. This ability to explain comes in virtue of being able to see the bits as working together as part of a coherent whole. This ability to explain is a necessary condition for understanding, because the ability to explain (insofar as one is truly explaining and not just mimiking the explanations of someone who truly understands) reveals that one has a grasp of the matter at hand. One could not explain if one did not have the requisite mental grasping. (There is definitely more to this than what I’ve said. Obviously.) I also want to claim that the ability to explain is a necessary condition. And if you lack the mental grasping, you lack understanding.

The same thing goes for having the ability to defend your explanations. This ability to defend your explanations (in an explanatory way… not just by pointing to an expert, not just by pounding your fist, etc) is also a necessary condition for understanding, for the same reasons as given above regarding the ability to give explanations.

So we’ve got these three necessary conditions; none of them separately are sufficient, but I think (I think! I may be persuaded otherwise.) that these three, together, may be sufficient for understanding. The last two conditions come simply in virtue of having this systematic and coherent grasp of the matter at hand; when you have this grasp, then you have these abilities. So we may be able to say that simply having this systematic and coherent grasp of the matter at hand is necessary and sufficient, just so long as it is clear that one has the ability to offer explanations and defend those explanations in virtue of having that grasp; if you lack the one, it’s an indication that you lack the other.

So this is the one thing that I wanted to say. But I realize that something else must be said about why one has the ability to offer and defend explanations just in virtue of having a coherent and consistent grasp of the relevant material. I think that this can be cashed out by describing the sort of grasp that one has and the sorts of relations between the bits of information (or whatever they are) that hold when one has the right sort of grasp. When one has understanding, one sees or grasps the explanatory relationships that hold between different bits of information. (I’m just echoing what Jon Kvanvig says, when he notes that “Understanding requires the grasping of explanatory and other coherence-making relationships in a large and comprehensive body of information.” (The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, pg 192)). One is able to offer explanations when one understands because the sort of grasp that one has between different bits of information within a larger body of information is a grasp of the explanatory relations that hold between those bits of information. It seems just blatantly obvious to me (after having read Kvanvig’s discussion of understanding. It failed to be apparent to me before then.) that when one has a grasp of the explanatory relations that hold between different bits of information then one will be able to offer explanations about those bits of information. And thus one will be able to offer those explanations as a result of having the sort of grasp requisite for understanding.

Putting a bit of an ancient spin, perhaps, on this last bit. We may want to say that one has a grasp of the causal relations that hold between the different bits of information, but then cash out this idea of causal relations in the more full ancient conception of cause where ’cause’ just means a sort ofbecause or explanation. This was my totally brilliant idea when I was driving home in the car. Writing it out now I fail to see the coolness of the idea like it was seen at just about Grant and Oracle. But maybe I’ll wake up at about 3:30 this morning with the ‘aha!’ moment when it’ll all click back into place. Or, given that I’ve a cold and am about to take some Nyquil, maybe not.