Once More Unto the Understanding
"It is not a given, once we turn a rigorous, scientific eye to the question, that the difference between 'knowing' and 'understanding' matters at all to the study of learning."
Over at X, psychologist Dan Willingham recently asked about the distinction between knowing and understanding:
Does anyone know of a useful description of the difference between "knowing" and "understanding?" When people use the terms, I think they generally are appealing to our intuitions. Is there something principled?
The responses in that thread—as of this writing—fall into two major categories. Let's take a look at both of these before thinking about what a more scientific response might look like.
Understanding Is 'Beyond' Knowing
"Knowing" involves recalling facts, information, or procedures. It is more about memorization & surface-level familiarity . . . "Understanding" involves grasping the deeper meaning, relationships, and implications behind the knowledge. It's about applying, analyzing, and synthesizing information. [1]
I can know the definition of a word from the dictionary, but to understand it I need to know how it is used, what it connotes, how it relates to other ideas. Gotta have a more developed schema about the idea to understand it. [2]
Knowing => memorization of the 2D symbols about a thing. Wordceling. Understanding => Being able to visualize the concepts in 4D. No words needed. Shape rotating. [3]
From a teacher’s perspective: knowing is ability to recall something, understanding is ability to explain something, its significance, and articulate connections to other concepts. [4]
These responses represent the perspective on 'understanding' that I am most familiar with from my time in education. Knowing seems to be mostly about simple recall, while understanding somewhat miraculously covers everything else: paraphrasing, application, connection to other concepts, flexibility, and so on.
Understanding Is Familiarity
Etymology might explain something: 'standing in the midst of' which seems more involved with something than 'knowing' something, which could be an uninvolved knowledge of the thing, standing outside of it and looking on…? [5]
I know we have gone to outer space- I do not understand the logistics/science/engineering that got us there. [6]
The meanings have become blurred in English but the distinction between "kennen" and "wissen" in German is useful. [7]
Iain McGilchrist would say experience is a key differentiator—the left hemisphere is good with facts, but the right is good with experience and context. Perhaps it's like the diff b/t dating and marriage. You can know a person when dating but truly understand in marriage. [8]
This perspective treats 'understanding' as having some kind of greater intimacy with the object of study than 'knowing,' which is more distant, aloof, or indirect. Interestingly, a few of the commenters in this category provided exemplar sentences to try to bring out a certain distinction without realizing that the forms of 'know' and 'understand' in their sentence could be transposed to suggest its exact opposite:
"I understand we have gone to outer space. I do not know the logistics, science, or engineering that got us there."
"I understand all the students in my class. That doesn't mean I know them." [9]
"I understand that the train leaves at 1:00 p.m. I know that if I'm late I'll miss it." [10]
The Scientific Perspective
While individual learning scientists are very interested in how people (like our lovely commenters above) naturally—and within professional communities—use the terms 'knowing' and 'understanding,' for the scientific process itself, endeavoring to create a principled distinction between the terms, these perspectives are irrelevant. It hardly matters that a bunch of people, whether educators or not, simply regurgitate definitions they have been fed by their culture or professional training. What matters to education science, at the outset, is whether or not it is useful to distinguish between the terms in the first place. (Just one commenter, David Didau, made this connection in the thread.)
Why should science be so dismissive of ideas represented in our everyday speech? One reason, which psychologist and psycholinguist Steven Pinker shows in The Stuff of Thought, is that much if not most of human language was developed and refined communally before there was a solid scientific understanding of the concepts represented therein. This is why we were all talking about sunrises—to take just one example—at least a century before we figured out that the Sun wasn't rising at all. And of course we still talk this way.
Similarly, the distinction between 'knowing' and 'understanding,' while no doubt serving an important purpose in everyday talk, long predates quality scientific knowledge about learning or the brain. So, it is not a given, once we turn a rigorous, scientific eye to the question, that the difference between the terms matters at all to the study of learning.
For it to matter, we need something better than folk semantics and pat assertions. If the two concepts of 'knowing' and 'understanding' are independent, then we should see gobs of people—given how widespread the distinction is in education circles—who can explain, for example, the historical connection between the development of the automobile and the Michelin-star rating system for restaurants but cannot recall what a car is or what a restaurant is. On the other hand, if we're not crazy and conceive of understanding as (a) dependent in some way on knowing, (b) functionally distinct from knowing, and (c) amenable to instruction, then we need to know how that's supposed to work. Good luck with that.
