The Internet of Us (21 page)

Understanding is a complex form of knowing, one that has several facets or elements. The first is that understanding isn't piecemeal; it involves seeing the whole. For example, think about the difference between knowing a pile of individual facts about some subject, theory or person and actually understanding that subject or theory or person. Understanding involves knowing not just the facts, but also the
how
or
why
something is the case. You understand more about the Civil War if you understand why and how it came about; you understand string theory if you understand why it predicts certain events; you understand a person to the extent you don't just know that she is unhappy, but what makes her unhappy. In each of these cases you are going beyond mere data to grasp something deeper and more profound.

The philosopher Stephen Grimm, who has thought as much about this topic as anyone recently, has pointed out that there is something in common between understanding
how
something is and
why
it is.
¹²
In both cases, he argues, we “grasp” or “see” not just individual elements, but the
structure
of the whole. This sounds grand, and it can be, as when we understand how a particular equation works or why a great historical event occurred. But it can also happen on a smaller scale. Consider, for example, the lucky person who understands how her car works. She has this understanding in part because she has certain skills, skills that give her the ability to see how various parts of a mechanism depend on one another: you can't get the car to move without the battery and the battery won't be charged without the alternator.
You understand when you see not just the isolated bits, but how those bits hang together. Similarly with understanding why. When we understand why something is the case, such as why a certain disease spreads or why your friend is unhappy, or why a given apple tree produces good apples, we grasp various relationships. These relationships are what allow us to see the difference between possibilities, between one hypothesis and another.

So, understanding is a kind of knowing that involves grasping relationships—the network, or parts and whole. But crucially, the relationships you grasp when you understand something aren't just correlations. To truly understand, you also need to know what
depends
on what—
why
the spread of a certain disease is related to hand-washing habits, or why having good apples depends on having a certain amount of rainfall.

The dependency relations we grasp when we understand can come in different forms. Some relations might be about cause and effect. Think of a game of chess: if I move my bishop to a certain square, I cause it to change its position. But they might also be logical: if I move my bishop to this square, it will be vulnerable to your pawn. Or semantic: the bishop can move to that square because the rules define it as being able to move diagonally across the board. In other words, the first important element of understanding is grasping dependency relations: having systematic knowledge of how things both fit together and depend on one another, causally, logically and otherwise.
¹³

That's why the person who truly understands something is often the person who can best explain it. In Plato's famous dialogue
Euthyphro
, the title character is an unlikable busybody and
self-anointed expert in religious matters. Socrates meets him on the steps of the courthouse, where Euthyphro is on his way to prosecute his own father, of all people. As it happens, Socrates is waiting for pre-trial proceedings to begin in his own trial for impiety and blasphemy against the gods. Socrates “innocently” asks Euthyphro to tell him what holiness is—he could use some advice, he says. Euthyphro answers, rather fussily, that holiness is what is loved by the gods.

No doubt, says Socrates slyly. But which comes first? Do the gods love what is holy because it is so, or is something holy simply because the gods happen to love it? Socrates is pointing out that Euthyphro's answer is really just expressing a correlation:

x
is holy when, and only when,
x
is loved by the gods.

If Euthyphro is right, being holy is perfectly correlated with being loved by the gods. So if you know what the gods love, you can perfectly predict what is holy—and vice versa. But this leaves it open which side of that correlation is really doing the work. It leaves open what depends on what. As such, it really doesn't offer an explanation of
why
the gods love what they do. Hence, it also doesn't offer an explanation of
what
holiness is.

Plato's point is instructive for another reason: it shows that this need for explanation can arise even in cases where the question of how much data (or how little) is moot. Euthyphro's equation, after all, purports to be a perfect correlation, and as such would be ideal for prediction. But it still doesn't answer the question. And were you an ancient Greek, it would be a question that would matter for how you conceived of your relationship to the
gods. If you think of the gods as discovering what is of ultimate value, then you think ultimate value is more fundamental to the universe. If you think they create it, then you think the gods are more fundamental. Which way you go, as Socrates later hints, can change how you see your relationship not just to the gods but to the universe itself.

Understanding is the kind of knowledge you need in order to be able to give a good explanation of something. And this is why we think of explanations as involving more than mere correlation. They make us aware of why things hang together, which in turn allows us to see that understanding is a matter of degree—the larger and more coherent the set of information one has about apple trees, etc., and the greater one's reflective and intuitive awareness of the coherent connections between one's beliefs about those matters, the greater one's understanding.
¹⁴
The greater your grasp of the whole, the better able you are to fully explain the phenomenon in question.

Knowing How to Chuck

We've talked about Plato. Now let's go highbrow and talk about Chuck.
Chuck
is a TV comedy in which the title character downloads a huge amount of secret NSA information from an “Intersect” computer. In the second season, a 2.0 version of the Intersect machine comes out, and Chuck is suddenly able to do more than just download facts. The computer literally drops abilities—like the ability to be super-good at kung fu—right into him. He then becomes (as the show says) the government's “most valuable asset.” Hilarity ensues.

Chuck, in short, is imagined as having gained knowledge from something like neuromedia. But the knowledge he supposedly gains isn't just of the book-learnin' type. It is know-how. He somehow acquires a skill, or what psychologists call procedural knowledge.

Understanding has a complex relationship to procedural knowledge, or the knowledge involved in having skills. This relationship is important not only for understanding understanding, but for grasping the extent to which technology like neuromedia can help us truly understand and how it cannot. So let's think about skills and procedural knowledge for a minute.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the dominant view of procedural knowledge has been that there is a very sharp difference between knowing how and knowing facts. The Oxford don Gilbert Ryle, in his influential 1949 book
The Concept of Mind
sets himself against the idea that “the primary exercise of minds consists in finding the answers to questions.”
¹⁵
Knowing how to do something, Ryle suggests, isn't a matter of knowing a particular fact. Instead, it is more like having an ability to do something. And the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus has influentially argued that knowing how to do something—like ride a bike—can't simply be understood as grasping a set of rules or directions. At bottom it involves a type of discernment or acuity that can't be discursively codified.
¹⁶

The idea that there is a sharp difference between knowing how and knowing facts seems to have some empirical support as well. Consider the famous case of the patient HM. HM was an epileptic who had undergone a lobectomy. He was then observed to have severe anterograde amnesia. In other words, he would forget events almost immediately after they happened. In a groundbreaking experiment, the cognitive psychologist Brenda Milner had HM perform
a mirror-drawing task in which he had to draw the outline of a star through a mirror while not being able to see his own arm.
¹⁷
The results were astounding: he was able to improve at the task after several days, even though he had no memory of the event. And that may suggest that acquiring a skill is completely distinct from having knowledge of facts, since he got better at doing something that he could never remember having done before.

This interpretation—and the sharp difference between practical and theoretical knowledge that goes with it—has been recently challenged. As the philosopher Jason Stanley and neuroscientist John Krakauer point out in a recent paper, HM
was
given explicit instructions before performing the mirror task. He was able to use that knowledge. Of course, being HM, he later forgot that he had that knowledge. He wasn't able to articulate it. But that doesn't mean he didn't possess the knowledge at any point, and that it didn't play a causal role in his ability to engage in the drawing. More generally, Stanley and Krakauer argue that motor skill tasks involve not just the manifestation of a motor acuity—the ability to make discriminations—but also the employment of receptive knowledge of facts. Motor skills, in other words, are package deals—they are complex states “requiring both increasing knowledge of required actions, and practice-related improvement in the selection and acuity of these actions.”
¹⁸
In other words, knowing how to ride a bike, or how to play tennis, involves not just physical acuity but at least some, probably unconscious, discursive knowledge.
¹⁹

One lesson we can learn from both perspectives—despite their differences—is that greater mastery of a skill involves more knowledge of the complex sort I've been calling
understanding
.
Aristotle and Plato saw the relationship between what the Greeks called
epistêmê
and
technê
. For the Greeks,
technê
meant an organized body of know-how or procedural knowledge—cooking, farming, sailing, knitting, programming and playing jazz are all examples. But for Plato and Aristotle both, really mastering a
technê
or skill meant that the expert understood—in the sense I've been explaining—the craft.

For the Greeks, the true expert—whether that person is a craftsman or a scientist—is someone who understands what they are doing. That understanding is what allows them to say why good apples differ from bad, to explain how a streamlined computer program works, to articulate the difference between the good political policy and the disastrous.
²⁰
That's why mastering a skill, for the Greeks, was not the same as having good habits, or even just having a knack or talent.
²¹
To truly master a skill, you of course need some talent, serious motivation, lots and lots of experience and practice; but you also need to understand how the details fit together, how the parts add up to something greater than themselves.
²²

The reciprocal relationship between skills and understanding is partly why experts can seem so baffling to the novice. When I was a young man, I studied martial arts with an instructor who drilled me repeatedly in certain traditional forms of striking and throwing. These forms involved following what were strict rules of movement. But when I saw my teacher spar with more advanced students, he would often deviate from those forms. When I asked him why he was not following the very forms I was being told to learn, he replied that he
was
following them. I just didn't know enough yet to understand how various actions fit together, and how the skilled practitioner, to fit the moment, could modify a
form. The master of a skill both knows the form, knows how it fits into the big picture, and has a certain acuity—one that, as Dreyfus says, cannot be reduced to a list of discrete discursive knowledge. He has an understanding that allows him, as Aristotle might say, to see how the universal is present in the particular.

So, one way in which understanding is related to skills is that mastering a skill produces understanding. But understanding of any type—understanding, as such—also essentially involves the
manifestation of a particular set of skills
.

Let's consider another story about Socrates, who was supposedly told by the Oracle of Delphi that he was the wisest man in Athens. Socrates famously replied that he only knew that he knew very little, or what he didn't know. So what sort of knowledge did he have? Well, consider what he was truly good at. One thing, surely, was asking questions. This came from a combination of facts and the ability to draw connections between them. As a result he had
know-which
, as it were. He knew
which
questions to ask.

Knowing-which is another element of understanding. The person who truly understands, in the philosophical sense, is discerning not only the actual situation, but also why various hypotheses and explanations
won't
work as well as how to ask what would. They know why kicking the refrigerator
here
and not
there
will help get it working. This is something that Socrates was great at, and it is something that experts in general can do. It also explains why understanding increases the better one is at asking the right questions. Experts—those who understand a given subject best—are often able to increase their understanding even further because they have the ability to know which question they should ask in the face of new information. By so doing, they can not only reveal
that Euthyphro knows nothing of piety, but that the good folks at MysticApples.com know hardly anything about apples.