What Is Understanding?
We live in an information rich (read: saturated) world. A world where data, facts, information, and knowledge can be obtained at the click of a button or the touch of a finger. However, this comes with downsides. One of these downsides is that the abundance of information can give the illusion of knowledge, and the acquisition of knowledge can give the illusion of understanding.
This doesn’t mean that more knowledge has no benefit—quite the contrary. Genuine understanding requires a significant degree of knowledge at its foundation. This is true when seeking to understand abstract ideas, complex political machinations, or indeed other people. As the famous stoic Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations:
“A lot of things are means to some other end. You have to know an awful lot before you can judge other people’s actions with real understanding.” ¹
The accumulation of knowledge is surely necessary for the development of real understanding, insight, and wisdom. But knowledge alone isn’t enough. Fellow stoic Epictetus alluded to this in The Art of Living:
“Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalised their contents.”
Or as Albert Einstein said, “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” What differentiates understanding from knowledge? One answer is that understanding is associated with meaning. In How We Think (1933), the American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey wrote that “To understand is to grasp meaning.” He gave this illustration:
“If a person comes suddenly into your room and calls out ‘Paper,’ various alternatives are possible. If you do not understand the English language, there is simply a noise which may or may not act as a physical stimulus and irritant. But the noise is not an intellectual object; it does not have intellectual value. To say that you do not understand it and that it has no meaning are equivalents. If the cry is the usual accompaniment of the delivery of the morning paper, the sound will have meaning, intellectual content; you will understand it. Or if you are eagerly awaiting the receipt of some important document, you may assume that the cry means an announcement of its arrival. If (in the third place) you understand the English language, but no context suggests itself from your habits and expectations, the word has meaning, but not the whole event. You are then perplexed and incited to think out, to hunt for, some explanation of the apparently meaningless occurrence. If you find something that accounts for the performance, it gets meaning; you come to understand it.”
Contemporary philosopher-investor Naval Ravikant also discusses the difference between knowing things versus understanding them. On an episode of the Tim Ferris podcast in October 2020, he explained:
“A lot of times we just define something with another definition. Or we just throw out a piece of jargon as if that means we know something. And you know, it’s the difference between memorisation and understanding. Understanding is the thing that you want. You want to be able to describe it in ten different ways in simple sentences from the ground up, and re-derive whatever you need.”
The difference between knowledge and understanding is acute in the context of decision-making. Real understanding and good decision-making flow from getting the basics — the first principles — right.
On the podcast, Ravikant continued:
“In the real world you get paid for making good judgements and decisions based on the basics. For instance, if you know arithmetic, statistics, [and] probability at a high level, and you understand some basic math, you have all the math that you need to succeed in life. You don’t need calculus or even trigonometry, or number theory, or set theory, or any of these kinds of things, unless you’re going into a deeply technical field or mathematics… So the basics are really important. That’s the steel frame, the foundation for understanding that you need to get through life. And too much of it is reduced to memorisation and understanding things as names, as definitions… And in professional life this happens a lot, which is jargon. People try to protect their knowledge by basically saying ‘Well, I understand this term and that term, and what this term means.’ But the reality is that most people don’t actually know what these things mean underneath… When you dig underneath, they don’t really understand the principle of what’s going on below it. And if you just understand the principles, even if you don’t understand the words, you will have an advantage… because you’ll understand underneath how the pieces are actually moving on the board, as opposed to what they’re called… Understanding is the thing to strive for.”
One of the primary reasons to strive for better understanding is to take some kind of action or make some kind of decision.² In some domains, such as military planning, the cash value of improved understanding is explicitly found in the improved quality and effectiveness of real-world actions and decisions.
The UK military, for instance, has a doctrine publication titled JDP 04 Understanding and Decision-Making. Not just ‘Understanding’ and not just ‘Decision-Making,’ but an integrated concept in which the former serves the latter, and the latter depends on the former. Although JDP 04 provides an overview of the philosophical nature of understanding, in the military context understanding has a pointedly practical, even pragmatic, purpose:
“Military understanding relates to what military forces need to understand to complete their missions, deliver operational success and, when necessary, identify, monitor and defeat adversaries.”
JDP 04 also frames understanding as a process, something that leverages the compounding effects of obtaining ever-deeper knowledge over time. The end result is that understanding something enables both insight into the present and foresight about the future:
“Understanding involves acquiring and developing knowledge to a level that enables us to know why something has happened or is happening (insight) and be able to identify and anticipate what may happen (foresight).”
As quoted above in How We Think (1933), John Dewey identified meaning as the key attribute of understanding: “To say that you do not understand it and that it has no meaning are equivalents.” So it’s no surprise that in summarising the differences between understanding and knowledge, JDP 04 puts meaning, and the lack thereof, at the top of this list:
What should we conclude? Let’s try this: understanding is a function of compound knowledge leveraged through meaning. That’s probably not entirely correct, but it sounds close enough — at least for now. More broadly, perhaps the gravest mistake of all is to confuse the accumulation of knowledge — ‘mere facts,’ one might say — with the attainment of deep understanding, genuine insight, and practical wisdom.
And on that note, cue Epictetus:
“The wisest among us appreciate the natural limits of our knowledge and have the mettle to preserve their naiveté. They understand how little all of us really know about anything. There is no such thing as conclusive, once-and-for-all knowledge. The wise do not confuse information or data, however prodigious or cleverly deployed, with comprehensive knowledge or transcendent wisdom…Once you realize how little we do know, you are not so easily duped by fast-talkers, splashy gladhanders, and demagogues. Spirited curiosity is an emblem of the flourishing life.”
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Notes
[1] The specific choice of words varies by translation. The quote used above is from the Gregory Hays translation. In the Martin Hammond translation (published by Penguin Classics), for instance, the quote is “Many things are done as part of a larger plan, and generally one needs to know a great deal before one can pronounce with certainty on another’s actions.”
[2] There’s also the purely intellectual pleasure of understanding something for its own sake, driven by an innate curiosity about how the world works. But let’s leave that aside for now.
