18
today’s workers in the field of human cognition.29 Rejecting the coextensive
assumption helped in focusing on the process nature of understanding.
As a process, human understanding is applicable to the full time scale of human
action. It is observed from approximately 10ms (cf. definition-14) to days, years and
more. Most of cognitive science is primarily concerned with phenomena whose
duration varies from approximately 100ms to about 10min.30 The large majority of
work on understanding falls within this time scale; it usually comes under the name
of comprehension. Orthogonal to the time scale dimension is the analyticity
dimension of human understanding. Along the latter dimension schools of thought are
distinguished according to whether they consider human understanding as a process
to be further analysed into some simpler notions (the analytic school) or consider it as
a primitive notion (the hermeneutic school). Most work falls in the analytic-
cognitive/rational quadrant (e.g., Greeno 1977; Johnson-Laird 2003; Just & Carpenter
1987; Schank 1972; St. John & McClelland 1990; Winograd 1972).31 In the analytic-
social band quadrant the most important work is that of Pask (1976) and Ziff (1972).
Finally, in the hermeneutic-social quadrant the work of Dilthey (1900), Moravcsik
(1979), Ricouer (1981) and Habermas (1981*1984; 1987) stand out. Some recent
work in the area of mirror neuron systems has attempted to link results in this area to
action and in particular the understanding of action (e.g., Jeannerod 2006; Rizzolatti
& Sinigaglia 2006). They did not address the issue of understanding per se.
The key conclusion in reviewing the literature on the nature of understanding is
that although agreement on its nature has not been reached two attributes of it are
virtually universally accepted. First, human understanding always involves the grasp
of meaning. Second, human understanding is a process that takes place in human
brains/minds.32 I submit that the reason for the existing disagreements on the nature
of understanding stem primarily from having focused on different bands of the time
scale of human action. In contrast, the combination of definitions 13&14 and of the
analysis that follows cover both the full scale of human action and incorporate all
major features of human understanding. In particular it is consistent with both the
process nature of understanding and its end result that may be seen as a state. The
latter point raises significant philosophical questions that fall beyond the scope of this
article.
Now, the important question is ‘what are the conditions under which
understanding has achieved? Work in the cognitive-analytic quadrant take successful
behavior in question-answering tasks, for instance, to constitute an adequate
terminating condition. That may be true but it is inapplicable when human
understanding is concerned with tasks requiring time scales that fall outside the
cognitive and rational bands. Such tasks constitute the bread and butter of the larger
part of science (I use the term to include both physical and social sciences and the
humanities). Without loss of generality the subsequent development of my analysis
will assume tasks of the latter type being the object of human understanding.
Naturally, thinking processes may, and do, terminate somewhere; but not all
thinking is called, or can be, understanding. One may, for instance, be interrupted
while trying to understand something and subsequently fail to catch again the thread
of that particular thinking process. To be sure, there may be future recall of the
interrupted process but the point is that at the time of interruption no understanding
may be said to have occurred. So, we conclude that not all terminated thinking
processes are processes of understanding.
Let us assume then that we witness a case of an undisturbed thinking process.
What additional conditions should be fulfilled in order to say that one has understood