05.05.2018

International workshop “Understanding understanding” at the RTG 1808

What is “understanding”, and why is it important to us? Is it possible to understand something without concepts like “truth”, “belief”, or “justification”? On May 4, 2018, we discussed these as well as many other questions during our workshop “Understanding understanding”, which took place at the University of Tübingen.

In the context of the cluster-of-excellence initiative that we pursue together with the University of Stuttgart, the workshop served as a contribution to the topic of understanding. The interdisciplinary approach addressed a large spectrum of fields that ranged from basic philosophical issues, to topics relating to literary studies and art theory, up to linguistic questions about understanding.

Our keynote speaker, Michael Hannon from the University of London, investigated the basic question what the essence of understanding was. He argued that understanding depends on competent explainers, and that explaining thus precedes understanding. Michael Stuart dealt with a similar question and pleaded for considering understanding as independent of terms like “truth”, “belief” and “justification”, and to, thus, distinguish it from knowledge. A formal logic approach was represented by Luis Rosa, who postulated that analytical truth does not exist and that logical operators cannot capture our understanding of natural language adequately.

It was also impressive to note how understanding can be connected to different medial representations. Xiaocui Qiu from the University of Stuttgart showed how the juxtaposition of image and text causes irony in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s oeuvre, and how this irony is perceived by the reader. Images and pictures also played an important role in Klaus Speidel’s talk. Klaus Speidel, who is a member of the University of Vienna, analysed empirically how viewers perceived paintings and concluded that pictures are in no way a static construct; instead they can be considered as narratives.

Of course, the topic of ambiguity was considered as well. Nicole Poppe presented an empirical study about how lexical ambiguities in Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield were resolved by recipients. Miriam Lahrsow showed how English poets from the 18^th and 19^th century made use of annotations in order to (dis)ambiguate their poetry. Her examples included Alexander Pope, who disambiguated his poems, which were often considered to be incomprehensible by contemporary reviewers, by means of annotations, and how Lord Byron rendered his (rather comprehensible) poems more ambiguous. Sarah Metzger made a linguistic contribution and argued for the consideration of figurative language as an important reference point concerning the disambiguation of verbs that are ambiguous between a stative and an eventive reading.

We warmly thank all the speakers as well as all the other contributors and participants and hope for further interesting and productive discussions on the topic of understanding.