The fundamentals of the art of understanding

Last time, I tried to show that we base our understanding of things, to a large extent, on assumptions we have about how things are, and that these assumptions are as good as never challenged. These assumptions lead to our biases about things. If they gain the upper hand, they become what we call prejudices. A prejudice is simply an assumption that one refuses to give up even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The question is, then, where do these assumptions come from?

Any number of situations and circumstances are involved. There is the culture into which we are born. Cultures are defined by what they take for granted about reality. The language(s) we speak also play an important role. There is no single one-to-one correspondence between one language and another; something is always lost in translation. Our socialization plays perhaps the largest role. By this I mean our family and immediate surroundings in which we grow up. There may be, say, an American or German culture, but how this culture is lived differs between New York and San Francisco as much as between Hamburg and Munich. The same holds true of language: dialectical differences emphasize some things and de-emphasize others. So, how our parents see the world greatly influences how we end up seeing the world and what we end up taking for granted. For the "good" child, it is because of the influences; for the "bad" child, it is in spite of them. Finally, our formal education plays an exceedingly strong role in all of this, for in school we don't just learn content, we learn how to read, learn, play games (of all sorts, even social ones) and what is acceptable beyond the boundaries of our own limited, personal communities.

Everybody does this. Everybody goes through this. And everybody conforms or does not conform to the pressures and learning processes all of this represents in different ways. We are, after all, individuals. In other words, the outcomes of the same process may be -- is most likely -- different from one person to the next, yet the underlying principle remains the same: assumptions, pre-suppositions, perhaps even prejudices are formed, and these are the basic building blocks of how we think, how we assess, how we evaluate, how we judge, how we discuss, and how we debate.

The big question that suddenly arises here, however, is how are we to know what deep, dark, secrets are lying beneath our discussion partners' or debate opponents' positions and arguments? How are we going to deal with them? The questions are legitimate, to be sure, but the answer is not as difficult to find as you may think: just like it says in the Good Book, "by their fruits, you shall know them". Yes, we only need take seriously what they are saying (or writing or doing) and a closer look at these can reveal what some of those fundamental assumptions are. We are then free(r) to deal with the arguments themselves. We can draw some reasonable conclusions about what might be driving a particular argument thereby making it easier to deal with the substance of that argument and not who in particular is delivering it.