Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-7pwfn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-12T12:04:44.559Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Breadth and Depth of Understanding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

David Pole
David Pole
Affiliation:
University of London, King's College
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Still waters, they tell us, run deep; as for philosophy, one who aims at anything like depth cannot always hope to move briskly. Let it excuse my beginning ploddingly, with familiar distinctions. We commonly distinguish what we call mere fact-gathering, however copious, from anything like real understanding; and again, superficial mental quickness from deeper processes, processes, to repeat the truism, that may run comparatively slowly. Philosophers have begun to distinguish too, but barely more than begun, understanding as a performance—I mean an overt linguistic or other behavioural performance—from something else that sometimes happens inwardly. Something happened, presumably, to the Wedding Guest, who on visible evidence only ‘went as one who has been stunned’, but also, presumably, understood.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 46 , Issue 176 , April 1971, pp. 109 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1971

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind, pp. 170–171Google Scholar.

2 It may be worth noting that similarly I can ‘see’, ‘see’ though non-verbally, the solution perhaps to a philosophical difficulty. True, when I come to put it into words my would-be solution may crumble in my hands; I was wrong all along, that is to say. But that, once again, is only to say that men are fallible; it no more shows that I am never entitled to say I ‘saw’ it, than the occurrence of visual illusions forbids my ever saying that I literally see, for instance, my own right hand or a straight stick that looks bent in water.

3 I could enlarge further on the point, but having dealt with it elsewhere (cf. ‘Understanding: a Psychical Process’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1960, esp. pp. 263–4) I shall forebear.

4 But like all pictures, however good in respect of what it is meant to illuminate, it has its dangers, too; which I shall return to shortly. They appear when we equate the self or true ‘subject’ with some real but mysteriously unidentifiable item, the equivalent of the physical eye; in brief, when we try to reify to ‘source’ of attention.

5 An element of something not unlike comedy intrudes itself when one tries listing the variety of psychical concepts for which behavioural analyses have been sought, with a view to explaining them away: thought, attention, emotion, knowledge, pleasure, among others.

6 Unconscious', of course, is not ‘non-conscious’. Teleological language is used, certainly, of non-conscious things, too, indeed of all organisms. An organism has first some form, to distinguish it from its environment; and further, some tendency to maintain that distinction, to ‘persevere in its own being’. Its organs co-operate to that end, which is precisely their function, their teleology. Otherwise such talk is metaphorical; but as to human thought and the like, aimed, say, at truth, the case is transparently different.

7 Of course, from another view the top-of-the-iceberg theory is acceptable enough; strong considerations lend it support. I would give them all the weight they deserve; but they are, I think, sufficiently taken care of by what I have emphatically allowed, unconscious mental processes—though qualified with the rider that they are and must be logically secondary.