7 - Education and the Transmission of Understanding

Summary

Chapter 7 considers whether there can be a transmission of understanding, arguing that understanding can indeed be transmitted by the kind of extended testimony that one finds in standard educational settings. To make the case, the chapter defends a neo-Aristotelian account of understanding as systematic knowledge of causes, where “causes” are understood broadly, in terms of various kinds of dependence relations. So understood, it is argued, the transmission of understanding can be conceived as a special case of the transmission of knowledge. The information economy framework enters the argument in two ways. First, the framework helps to explain both the mechanisms by which understanding is transmitted by testimony in educational settings, and the intuition that it cannot be. Second, the framework helps to address an objection to the claim that understanding is a kind of knowledge.