Understanding the Facts Makes All Knowledge Partly Subjective

Mental maps and the oxymoron of pure objectivity

Photo by Leah Kelley, from Pexels

One source of humanistic pride is our ability to know what we’re talking about.

We assume that knowledge makes us godlike, compared to animals and inanimate things since we can understand what’s real and use the facts to our advantage. But what exactly is it to understand something, and does understanding limit objectivity?

Understanding as the Grasping of Meaning

To understand something is to “perceive its meaning” or to “grasp its implications or importance,” possibly due to thorough familiarity with the thing. There are degrees of understanding. For instance, those who are fluent in English will know what the word “skydiving” means, but unless they’ve been skydiving, which would give them practical experience of jumping out of an airplane, their knowledge will be superficial. They’ll understand the word but not what it’s like to perform the act itself.

The word “understand,” though, is odd. The root idea seems to be the metaphor that you stand under what you’re familiar with in that your concept or experience of it acts like scaffolding that can mentally reconstruct the understood thing in your mind. The word “stand” derives from…