'to know' and 'to understand' -- what's the difference?

or...


"I knew I was going to take the wrong train, so I left early."

Knowledge is fairly easy to come by. Undertsanding takes a lifetime.

Understanding is fairly easy, knowing for sure is close to impossible.

I suspect, Osso, that our disgreement is nothing more than a matter of semantics.

I know, Merry - I understandboth points of view and agree with them...










edit to playfully add italics

i think andrew, that 'understanding' is an epiphanal intellectual event, which takes place in the mind (a factor that has lead many religious aprentices down the twisty road of 'born again'!); where there is a sudden transition from the status of interested data gatherer, to the possition of 'one who actually grasps the concept' of 'whatever', and has an 'understanding' of how it works, what it 'means', and its 'about'!

[the eureka, response]

Mine was also a eureka response.

(I live in Eureka.)

I'm with Merry

I understand you know him

I think you are referring to the "aha!" moment, Bogowo. Freud suggested that knowledge goes
through transformation while stored.

Interesting question. In my previous post I
asserted that I may understand the theorem,
but if I don't know it (commit it to memory) I will
be in trouble at exam time........

However, I might know (be able to recall) the
theorem, but if I dont understand it, trouble also
looms....

I have often heard people say....."My mind
went blank in the exam and I couldn't remember
anything". I only experienced that when my mind WAS blank (through doing no work) prior to the exam, therefore nothing to recall .....didn't know nothing in other words!!

Exactly, shepaints, but I think that the cognitive psychologists are the ones who coined the "AHA" look at the mental processes. I know that Piaget talked about accommodation and assimilation in higher mental functions, but his ideas were more developmental. As I recall (heh heh), Freud didn't have a sudden insight theory.

.....Letty, as I recall it, you wont get an 'aha' unless your unconscious mind is working overtime!

Thanks Letty, great article. You are right, I don't believe Freud used the term aha or eureka....

This is what I was trying to get at....

"Recent findings suggest that people think about solutions, at an unconscious level, prior to solving insight problems"

It has been a while since I read Freud. From what I remember, he said that while material is stored
in memory, it is not passive. It can be retranscribed and rearranged, especially when confronted with new information or circumstances.

People often say "I'll sleep on it" when trying to solve a complicated problem. I think they are referring to what Freud would call "dreamwork". The solution to the problem may occur seemingly spontaneously at a later time in a different context. Meanwhile, the unconscious mind has been hard at work solving the problem.....deferred action, I
think it is called.

shepaints, it has been sooooooo long since I studied Freud, almost as long as it has since I did Skinner, or read Walden II.

I just know that this thread has been a learning thread for me.

Re: 'to know' and 'to understand' -- what's the difference?


Young people often display "know-it-all" attitudes.

"I KNOW, I KNOW," they exclaim in exasperation when their parents attempt to explain the complexities of life. It is difficult to impart to them the wisdom that comes with age because they think they already KNOW it all and/or are hell-bent on learning it for themselves through experience.

The older I get, the more I realize how much I don't KNOW. The tree of knowledge is infinite. The branches are gnarled, intertwined, and fork off in so many directions that it takes a lifetime just to learn a few small segments of a few branches.

Life should be a quest for learning and growing. Some people open their minds and develop a unsatiable thirst for knowledge. They have the attitude, "You're never too old to learn." They will question traditional beliefs and explore the tree of knowledge in the hope of gaining wisdom and understanding, but with the realization that no one person can know and understand everything.

Other people close their minds and grab hold of their beliefs -- what they think they KNOW -- and they won't venture or explore. They are satisfied with the smallness of their knowledge. They may even deny the existence of the infinite nature of knowledge. They have the attitude, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." They are unbending and inflexible.

Understanding is enlightenment, but we are not an enlightened society. We are trudging forward, but I doubt that human beings will ever reach true enlightenment. I suspect our species will become extinct and leave most of the branches on the tree of knowledge unexplored.

Love your last paragraph, Debra. I would add to it that I suspect, at our present stage in evolution, we are quite incapable of understanding some things and, thus, incapable of achieving any true "enlightenment." Just as you not only can't teach a dog to read but can't even teach it understand the concept of "reading", so there are things in this world that we not only don't understand but have no notion of what they are or how any undefrstanding could be reached. We may evolve further, we may not.

These are two things that come to mind:

1.
To know something one must first pass it though rational though, otherwise it would only be true that: "Someone claimed that..." and not know it themselves.
If Nancy tells Mike that the earth is not flat, Mike only knows that Nancy said the earth is not flat. Mike could only know via corroborating, experimenting or understanding the fact.

2.
If John knows something but can't explain it, then he doesn't understand it. Comes from here