Funded by a $4.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the Varieties of Understanding project came to a close on June 24 with the capstone conference drawing multidisciplinary international scholars to the Lincoln Center campus. The three-year project has underwritten research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and theology on the question of how we understand the world.

The scholars who participated in the project have collectively generated significant research in their respective fields, Grimm said. Ten books were accepted or published by major printing presses, including Oxford University Press and Harvard University Press, and 52 journal articles were published or accepted in journals, including Nous, Cognition, Child Development, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Faith and Philosophy, and Philosophical Studies—with more than 40 more articles currently under review.

“We have helped found a new field of inquiry, the study of understanding,” said Grimm. “This vibrant new field has led to more inquiry, more discussions, more debates, all of which are helping to increase our understanding of understanding itself.”

Grimm produced four papers for the project and will continue his research this fall as a visiting fellow at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. Among his research interests are two different kinds of understanding: one by which we “grasp” the world, and another that the world presents to us.

“One of the capstone speakers, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, said that you read well when you let the novel or the poem grasp you—you’re not trying to grasp it or tinker with it. You’re being receptive to it, looking to see what it is pointing out to you,” Grimm said.

“There are some kinds of knowledge that we ‘grasp,’ such as the causal structure of the world. But then there are things like literary understanding that is more receptive and attentive. That’s a different kind of understanding.”

The Limits of Understanding

Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson’s plenary talk, “How We Talk!” cautioned against becoming overconfident in our capacity to understand. She focused on academia’s use of scrupulously precise and reductionistic language, which she said gives an air of communicating truth.

Language, though, is “complex and endlessly open to new complications,” she said, “more like a brilliant companion of humanity than its creation.”

“It’s like living with a creature, like a cat or something. You begin to find out it has its own ways of operating, that you can’t coerce it or control it,” she said. “We know language is alive, because it can be lifeless. It dies in captivity.”

Language is taken captive when academia—particularly social sciences, Robinson said—clings to jargon for the sake of being precise. Often, that precision becomes conflated with truth, leading us to overestimate just how much we actually understand about a given subject. Respecting the complexity and vitality of language keeps us intellectually humble, she said.

A Multi-University Effort

The $3.56 million Templeton grant and more than $640,000 in supplemental funds were used to distribute approximately $2.6 million in subawards to fund new research on the psychology, theology, and philosophy of understanding. Twenty projects were selected from nearly 400 proposals.

Tania Lombrozo, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; Michael Strevens, PhD, professor of philosophy at New York University; and Gordon Graham, PhD, the Henry Luce III Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at Princeton Theological Seminary directed the distribution of awards for psychology, philosophy, and theology, respectively.

Lombrozo directed empirical and theoretical research out of her Concepts and Cognition Lab at the University of California, Berkeley on the psychology of human understanding. Her team conducted a survey of how people generally view the ability of science to understand. Most people, the team found, believe that science is limited to empirical data.

In other words, science is useful for elucidating the world around us, but it fails when it comes to explaining phenomena such as romantic love or religious beliefs.

For a full description of the project, visit the Varieties of Understanding website.

The Varieties of Understanding Midpoint Conference is the first of two gatherings in a three-year interdisciplinary project that sponsors research into the various ways in which human beings understand the world.

Stephen R. Grimm, PhD, an associate professor of philosophy, received a $3.56 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation and supplemental funds totaling more than $640,000 to launch the project, which focuses on the fields of psychology, philosophy, and theology.

“Aristotle says in Metaphysics that we’re interested in not just how things stand in the world, but why they stand the way they do,” Grimm said at the conference’s opening, held at the Lincoln Center campus.

“This desire to have ‘why’ questions answered is at the root of human understanding… Einstein tells us that scientific work is driven by ‘the irresistible desire to understand the secrets of nature.’ [Philosopher] Wilfrid Sellars says philosophy is driven by a desire to understand how ‘things’ in the broadest possible sense of the term ‘hang together.’”

Knowing more, understanding less

Understanding is something beyond knowledge, Grimm said. He offered the example of a Jeopardy! game: A person may be able to memorize many facts about the category American Civil War—for instance, when and where the war began, how many casualties resulted, and how slavery and states’ rights factored into the conflict.

However, if this person fails to see how these various data relate to each other as part of the whole phenomenon of the Civil War, then it seems he knows a lot about the Civil War without actually understanding it.

“The question is, what else is needed to transform Jeopardy! knowledge into understanding?” said Grimm, a philosopher who specializes in epistemology. “Understanding has been described as a feeling of some kind—a feeling of insight, like an ‘aha’ or a ‘eureka’… But what actually happens in the mind when we move from knowing a list of propositions about a topic to understanding it? What is that feeling an indication of?”

This question is especially relevant in the age of Big Data and the Internet, he said. Google has made acquiring information simple. Having greater access to data, however, does not necessarily mean that we understand more about the world.

Although we may be learning more, said Grimm, we may be “losing our ability to appreciate the deep connections about these various bits of information.”

“We know more, but we understand less.”

The grant was used to distribute approximately $2.6 million in subawards to fund new research on the psychology, philosophy, and theology of understanding. Twenty projects were selected from nearly 400 proposals to receive awards.

The eclectic group of international scholars—comprised of both world-renowned figures and up-and-coming young scholars—are presenting their initial findings over the course of the three-day midpoint conference.

Project topics include: a psychological study of why people are prone to believe an explanation that is complicated, whether or not it is correct; a cross-cultural inquiry into religious understanding; and a philosophical discussion of whether there can be different kinds or degrees of understanding.

In June of 2016, the award recipients will reconvene at the Lincoln Center campus and present their final research results at a capstone conference.

Tania Lombrozo, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; Michael Strevens, PhD, professor of philosophy at New York University; and Gordon Graham, PhD, the Henry Luce III Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at Princeton Theological Seminary directed the distribution of awards for psychology, philosophy, and theology, respectively.

As part of the project, Lombrozo has been directing empirical and theoretical research out of her Concepts and Cognition Lab at the University of California, Berkeley on the nature of human understanding. She offered some of her initial findings at the opening of the midpoint conference.

For a full description of the project, visit the Varieties of Understanding website.