Imagination and understanding

Once we consider how much chatbots understand what they say, we might ask once again how we ourselves do our understanding. Incidentally, there was also a recent discussion about creating imagination (more specifically, a mental imagery), and it occurred to me that there is a connection I had not previously noticed:

Translated to German, ‘imagine’ is the causative of ‘understand’.

• ‘Understand’ is verstehen which comes from standing right in front of something. (English understanding even comes from inter, i.e. standing right among, in between.)
• Now ‘imagine’ is vorstellen, and stellen ( = ‘to put’) is the causative word of stehen (= ‘to stand’) — I put something somewhere such that it will then stand there.

So, the active attempt described by Høeg, to “create”, “summon up”, “construct” a mental image, vorstellen, is linked to an ideal state of verstehen where the immediate presence of, or immersion into, a phenomeon yields a plausible, deep, kind of understanding.

Note that unlike ‘imagination’, the German equivalent is not tied to ‘image’ and the visual sense. But of course, with the visual impression of something right in front of you it is probably much easier to ‘see’ the connections between multiple items that appear all-at-once in a spatial view, than with sequential speech or text — at least for many people including me, and I think this is why is is often said that “Our Sense of Vision Trumps All Others”.

Imagination

Everybody has their own idea about understanding and the various meanings of the word, from mere acoustic and superficial senses, to mechanical ‘snap in’ or ‘fall in place’ senses, to an empathic sense and other deeper forms of understanding, including some kind of personal relationship through the “standing in front of”.

In the above-linked video about chatbots, the criterion of understanding is whether they can apply it to similar examples. I think this is still a superficial sense, although it certainly fits into the educational context of proving and assessing one’s internal state of understanding which is impossible to tap more directly.

(But, just like the unfortunate discussion about cheating in essay writing, it is a pity that the focus is so much on competitive assessing and suspicion, instead of a bit of trust that, immersing a student for years into a simulation of what they want to become, will in most cases grow sufficient understanding for responsible work, and that total failures may be detected much easier and earlier, ideally by the student themselves.)

Caveats: 1. It is always problematic to draw conclusions from etymology, and I may have even misrepresented the actual case here. And if it’s correct here, someone else has certainly written about it whom I failed to read. 2. As often, the post draws on ideas from Stephen Downes, in particular re superficial and deeper, which I may not have sufficiently understood, either.

Image is a Remix of Reaching for Rainbow and Centered Under the Arches by Alan Levine (public domain), plus MS Office stock photo