Google-knowing, while a basis for understanding, is not itself the same as understanding because it is not a creative act.
To use the Internet is to have the testimony machine at your fingertips. That is what makes it so useful. But understanding is often said to be different from other forms of knowledge precisely because it is not directly conveyed by testimonyâand thus not directly teachable. 2 Again, you can give someone the basis for understanding. But in the usual cases, you canât directly convey the understanding itself. An art teacher, for example, can give me the basis for creative thought by teaching me the rudiments of painting. She can give me ideas of what to paint and how to paint it. But I did not create these ideas; I create when I move beyond imitating to interpret these ideas in my own way. Likewise, you can give me a theorem without my understanding why it is true. And if I do come to understand why it is true, I do so because Iâve expended some effortâIâve drawn the right logical connections. Coming to understand is something you must do for yourself.
Letâs contrast this with other kinds of knowledge. I can download receptive knowledge directly from you. You tell me that whales are mammals; I believe it, and if you are a reliable source and the proposition in question is true, I know in the receptive way. No effort needed. Or consider responsible belief: you give me some evidence for whales being mammals. You tell me that leading scientists believe it. If the evidence is good, then if I believe it, Iâm doing so responsibly. But in neither case do I thereby directly understand why whales are or arenât mammals. You can, of course, give me the explanation (assuming you have it). But to understand it, I must grasp it myself.
Or so it is generally. One might wonder, however, whether that would remain the case were we as fully integrated as the neuromedia possibility imagines. To have neuromedia would be like reading minds. Youâd be able to access other peopleâs thoughts through littlemore than the intermediary of satellites. We would all be Google Completing our thoughts for one another, and as result collaboration could very well start to feel from the inside like individual creation does now.
This is still a long way from showing that neuromedia would increase our understanding of the world all by itself. There is no doubt that information technology is already radically facilitating collaboration. And coming to understand, like any act of creation, is something you can do with others. But just because you can understand with others doesnât alter the fact that understanding involves a personal cognitive integrationâa combination of various cognitive abilities in the individual, including a grasp of dependency relations and the skill to make leaps and inferences in thought. It ultimately involves an element of individual cognitive achievement. Understanding is not something I can outsource .
Yet what makes this individual cognitive achievement so valuable? Why worry about understanding if correlation, as Chris Anderson might say, gets you to Larissa? What can it add that other forms of knowing cannot?
Understanding is a necessary condition for being able to explain, and explanations matter. A well-confirmed correlation can be the basis of (probabilistic) predictions. But prediction is not the only point of inquiry, nor should it be. Good explanations for why a correlation holds give us something more. As the eminent philosopher of science Philip Kitcher has noted, good explanations are fecund. 3 They donât just tell us what is; they lead us to what might be: they suggest further tests, further views, and they rule out certain hypotheses as well. Moreover, if you want to control something and not just predict what it will do given the preexisting data, you needto know why it does what it does. You need to understand. Thus, being able, on the
To use the Internet is to have the testimony machine at your fingertips. That is what makes it so useful. But understanding is often said to be different from other forms of knowledge precisely because it is not directly conveyed by testimonyâand thus not directly teachable. 2 Again, you can give someone the basis for understanding. But in the usual cases, you canât directly convey the understanding itself. An art teacher, for example, can give me the basis for creative thought by teaching me the rudiments of painting. She can give me ideas of what to paint and how to paint it. But I did not create these ideas; I create when I move beyond imitating to interpret these ideas in my own way. Likewise, you can give me a theorem without my understanding why it is true. And if I do come to understand why it is true, I do so because Iâve expended some effortâIâve drawn the right logical connections. Coming to understand is something you must do for yourself.
Letâs contrast this with other kinds of knowledge. I can download receptive knowledge directly from you. You tell me that whales are mammals; I believe it, and if you are a reliable source and the proposition in question is true, I know in the receptive way. No effort needed. Or consider responsible belief: you give me some evidence for whales being mammals. You tell me that leading scientists believe it. If the evidence is good, then if I believe it, Iâm doing so responsibly. But in neither case do I thereby directly understand why whales are or arenât mammals. You can, of course, give me the explanation (assuming you have it). But to understand it, I must grasp it myself.
Or so it is generally. One might wonder, however, whether that would remain the case were we as fully integrated as the neuromedia possibility imagines. To have neuromedia would be like reading minds. Youâd be able to access other peopleâs thoughts through littlemore than the intermediary of satellites. We would all be Google Completing our thoughts for one another, and as result collaboration could very well start to feel from the inside like individual creation does now.
This is still a long way from showing that neuromedia would increase our understanding of the world all by itself. There is no doubt that information technology is already radically facilitating collaboration. And coming to understand, like any act of creation, is something you can do with others. But just because you can understand with others doesnât alter the fact that understanding involves a personal cognitive integrationâa combination of various cognitive abilities in the individual, including a grasp of dependency relations and the skill to make leaps and inferences in thought. It ultimately involves an element of individual cognitive achievement. Understanding is not something I can outsource .
Yet what makes this individual cognitive achievement so valuable? Why worry about understanding if correlation, as Chris Anderson might say, gets you to Larissa? What can it add that other forms of knowing cannot?
Understanding is a necessary condition for being able to explain, and explanations matter. A well-confirmed correlation can be the basis of (probabilistic) predictions. But prediction is not the only point of inquiry, nor should it be. Good explanations for why a correlation holds give us something more. As the eminent philosopher of science Philip Kitcher has noted, good explanations are fecund. 3 They donât just tell us what is; they lead us to what might be: they suggest further tests, further views, and they rule out certain hypotheses as well. Moreover, if you want to control something and not just predict what it will do given the preexisting data, you needto know why it does what it does. You need to understand. Thus, being able, on the
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