Wednesday 22 January 2020

Understanding as an Alethic Concept

One of the ways in which I have defended the value of the humanities is by reference to understanding, as in “the humanities help to improve our understanding of ourselves and our environment, and this is important”.   This is both initially plausible and helps to lay out a kind of value that is distinct from the gathering of knowledge, which the sciences seem to do better than the humanities. 

 

One advantage of taking this route is that “understanding” is a rather wide-ranging term that has many meanings, so people can import various, positive, interpretations into the phrase “improve our understanding”.  This is, of course, also a disadvantage, for it renders the basic defence ambiguous.  So what does it mean to say that the humanities improve our understanding?

 

Among the rather familiar and straightforward meanings of “understanding” we could list:

 

·      The knowledge of linguistic meaning: e.g. “x understands English”

·      A sympathetic or gentle approach or demeanour: “x was very understanding of y’s situation”

·      An informal agreement: “x and y came to an understanding”

·      A belief state that is the result of inference or observation: “I understand that you have changed jobs”

·      An assumption, perhaps unspoken or hidden: “it is understood that everyone will speak respectfully at department meetings”

·      A cognitive ability: “it is impossible for non-human animals to understand that moral obligations exist.”

 

When it comes to the value that humanities offer, I think, however, that the best meaning is something along these lines:

 

·      To understand something, P, is to realize or learn the significance of P; e.g. “I understand that this is a very complex issue that impacts x, y, and, z and will require further investigation”

 

That seems to capture what the humanities are after: to discover and impart methods, tools, writings, interpretations, and arguments that will allow us to learn something of significance about something, which may be that that something is in fact significant.  So, understanding, will result when some argument or analysis makes clear to us: (1) that P is significant/important; or (2) what is significant/important about P.

 

This indicates that understanding is similar in certain respects to explanation.  An explanation, E, of P makes P clear to us or, as I would say, enables us to see why or that P is true, either by entailing P, rendering P probable, or fitting P coherently into our prior body of knowledge.  

In the case of explanation, however, E can explain P even if E is false.  For example, Aristotle explained why material bodies sink in water by appeal to (1) hylomorphism, which includes the claim that bodies (“substances”) include an immanent form; (2) a theory of space that is structured formally, with “earth” at the center, surrounded by, in order, “water”, “air”, and “fire”; and (3) a principle which states that anything with form F will naturally seek space that is F.  Given (1) – (3) it follows that rocks, “earth”, will sink because the “earth” form of space is below the “water” part.  So, (1) – (3) are explanatory.

 

They are not, however, true.  Accordingly, I suggest, Aristotle’s explanation cannot provide us with any understanding of the motions of bodies. In particular, it cannot offer any additional understanding than what was contained in the prior observation that rocks fall in water, fire rises in air, and so on.  Aristotle’s attempt to move from those straightforward observations to a systematic elucidation of what is going on when bodies move ultimately fails for the simple reason that it is, so we currently believe, false: we no longer accept his account of the structure of space and reject his formal account of attraction (bodies don’t naturally move, we think, but instead naturally continue in their current state).  So even though Aristotelian physics neatly explains motion in virtue of providing a set of propositions that entails a great deal of what we observe, it does not offer understanding of motion.  This is, of course, not unique: it is straightforward to construct a set of propositions that are false but entail or make probable some other proposition that is known to be true.

 

Let’s consider a made-up case in which x is afraid of the dark and posits that this was caused by x’s abduction by extraterrestrials one night years ago, which left a deep-seated fear that is brought to the surface in the dark.  This would explain the fear: the proposition that x was abducted combined with the proposition that this was traumatic and that trauma can leave a lasting fear that is associated with the time of day during which the initial event occurred, entails or renders probable a current fear.  However, x does not in fact understand why the fear exists, if the abduction never occurred.  Further, a non-occurrent event cannot increase x’s awareness of the significance or importance of the fear: the abduction proposition adds nothing on that score either (no more than supposing x’s fear is caused by unicorns or magic).

 

What this suggests is that the understanding sought by the humanities is in fact an alethic concept: whatever it is that increases understanding must be true.  The same applies for a good explanation, so understanding is something like a good or correct explanation of the significance of something.

 

If this is right, then it immediately raises a question: how can the humanities improve our understanding if they do not either: (1) discover the truth, at least in part; or (2) apply truth-preserving methods to previously discovered truths?  In the absence of truth, there can be no understanding, so the humanities must either be able to determine the truth or else take the truth and derive something from it that clarifies the importance of something.  

 

In the latter case, this process of derivation must be truth preserving or probability/coherence increasing; otherwise it will not in fact increase our understanding.  It may of course be possible to do something in addition to determining the truth or an alethic consequence from what is known.  That is, the process of increasing understanding may involve deriving something, P, from something known as well as situating this truth in some kind of context that is enlightening.  But again, if this context is not factual, situating a truth in it cannot improve our understanding, so there is a kind of alethic constraint at all stages of the process.

 

So, if all this is roughly along the right lines, then any humanities project aimed at improving understanding must, at least in part, either discover the truth or else work with the truth to derive further truths that are significant or can be contextualized with other truths in such a way as to produce an improvement in our awareness of the significance or importance of something, which must also be of genuine or true significance, for otherwise we have no understanding (if something isn’t truly significant, then we cannot really understand its significance.)  

 

In short, if we want to improve our understanding of P, then:

 

1.     P must be true

2.     The theory (story/account/proposition/…), T, that improves the understanding of P must be true

3.     T must have some truth preserving or probability raising relation to P (otherwise it cannot help us see that/why P is true)

4.     T may also do more than (3): for example it ay relate P to a context, C, or another understood proposition, Q.

5.     If (4), then C or Q must be true as well.

 

I don’t, in other words, see how the appeal to “understanding”, in the defence of the value of the anything, gets a discipline off the hook of either being truth-producing or at least truth-preserving.  So, any field that aims at understanding must employ methods that have one or both of these properties.  This, of course, includes the humanities.

 

One worry about (1) – (5) above is whether it is compatible with a robust notion of fictional truth, i.e. one in which fictional propositions can be literally and directly true, as in “that Centaurs have four legs is true” instead of “that Geek myth-makers said that Centaurs have four legs is true”.  If one takes it to be true that Centaurs have four legs, then presumably we could offer a study to increase our understanding of Centaurs themselves, which seem never to have existed, rather than our understanding of their story-tellers, which do or did exist.  This seems awkward.  I am not sure how much of a problem any of this is, but it seems to me to have a rather felicitous implication: there is reason to adopt an indirect account of fictional truth in which propositions about fictional entities are in fact about the acts and thoughts of writers and story-tellers, in which case the study of mythology can aid in our understanding insofar as it aids in our understanding of human beings who make up tales and the societies and times in which they live.  This seems perfectly respectable, so long as it is alethic in the ways mentioned above.


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