Workshop
Understanding “Understanding”
- Gregory Naber (Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA)
Abstract
We are all engaged in the struggle to “understand” something. The nature of the world that we seem to perceive around us.
- The properties of the primes.
- The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics.
- The unreasonable effectiveness of physics in mathematics.
- The meaning of “consciousness”.
- The meaning of “right” and “wrong”.
- Finnegans Wake.
- The music of Schönberg.
- The meaning of “understanding”.
Does “understanding” mean the ability to “explain”? Does it mean the ability to “predict”? Is there more than one way to “understand”? Is “understanding” always “rational”? Is “understanding” psychological, physiological, cultural, a matter of training, or of language, or something else altogether? Is the meaning of “understanding” any more transparent in physics and mathematics?
