Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Understanding

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Understanding is neither data extraction nor pattern recognition, but an encounter with the matter — the hermeneutic act in which two horizons of understanding open themselves to the about-which of speech and mutually enlarge one another.

Gadamer’s fusion of horizons

Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method (1960, Part III), develops the central thesis of philosophical hermeneutics: the hermeneutic archphenomenon is the conversation, and understanding is letting oneself in upon the matter, not empathizing with the other as a psyche (GW 1, p. 387ff.).

“Being that can be understood is language.” (GW 1, p. 478) — Understanding is linguistically constituted; what can be understood can be articulated in language.

The central movement is the fusion of horizons (p. 311): understanding is neither the adoption of a foreign horizon at the cost of one’s own, nor persistence in one’s own with rejection of the foreign — but the enlargement of one’s own horizon of understanding through the encounter with the foreign, in which both sides become richer without either capitulating.

In the essay The Incapacity for Conversation (1971), Gadamer determines the capacity for conversation as a moral virtue: being able to listen, exposing oneself to the matter, allowing oneself to be called into question.

Heidegger: understanding as existential

For Martin Heidegger (Being and Time, 1927), understanding is not primarily a cognitive achievement but an existential — a fundamental structure of human Dasein (§31). In understanding, Dasein discloses its own possibilities and its world. Discourse (§34) articulates this intelligibility; its inauthentic counterpart is idle talk (§35), which is cut loose from the about-which and merely hears itself.

The about-which of discourse — the matter — is Heidegger’s key. Understanding is always understanding of something; without a matter there is no understanding, only idle talk.

Augustine: the inner teacher

Augustine formulates in De magistro (ca. 389) a thesis that sounds paradoxical and is hermeneutically deep: no one learns through words alone. Whoever does not know the thing signified learns nothing from the sign; whoever knows it learns from the sign not the thing signified, but recognizes it again. The true teacher is the truth that illuminates from within — the “inner teacher.”

This is not mysticism but hermeneutics: understanding requires a reference to the matter that language awakens, but does not produce.

Wittgenstein: understanding in the form of life

Ludwig Wittgenstein sharpens the condition in the Philosophical Investigations (1953): meaning lives in use (§43); language games are embedded in forms of life (§§19, 23). The most famous point (PI II, xi): “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” Understanding requires shared practice, not merely shared codes.

It follows that understanding cannot be derived from linguistic data. Even perfect syntactic-semantic mastery of a language is not enough — it requires embeddedness in a form in which being-spoken has any sense at all.

What LLMs do not understand

The three determinations (Gadamer: matter; Heidegger: about-which; Wittgenstein: form of life) converge in the diagnosis: an LLM has no matter, no about-which, no form of life. It has token sequences and activation patterns. Its “understanding” is a pattern match — what Hubert Dreyfus (What Computers Still Can’t Do, 1992) determined as the opposite pole to skilled coping in a world.

Mahowald, Ivanova et al. (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2024) operationalize the diagnosis: formal linguistic competence (grammar, idiom, style) is attainable at the human level for LLMs; functional linguistic competence (inference, pragmatics, social cognition, world model) remains fragmentary. The surface suffices for the appearance of understanding — not for its enactment.

Understanding and education

If understanding is a virtue (Gadamer), then it is something that can be practiced — through reading, conversation, devotion to matters, patience with the foreign horizon. The concern of pedagogy (Pieper, Spaemann) is the possibility that a culture which consumes much “information” and has little “matter” may unlearn understanding.

Ontological classification

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1960): Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: Mohr (Eng.: Truth and Method).
  • Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1971): Die Unfähigkeit zum Gespräch. In: Universitas 26, pp. 1295—1304 (reprinted in: Kleine Schriften IV, Tübingen: Mohr 1977).
  • Heidegger, Martin (1927): Sein und Zeit. Halle: Niemeyer (Eng.: Being and Time).
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953): Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell (bilingual, translation by G. E. M. Anscombe).
  • Augustine: De magistro. CSEL 77.
  • Dreyfus, Hubert (1992): What Computers Still Can’t Do. A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Mahowald, Kyle; Ivanova, Anna A.; Blank, Idan A.; Kanwisher, Nancy; Tenenbaum, Joshua B.; Fedorenko, Evelina (2024): Dissociating Language and Thought in Large Language Models. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 28(6), 517—540.

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