Chapter 3

I had a hard time finding any compelling reasons to beleive that understanding can only happen at a plural level. Mason explains that understanding has had a history of moving form personal to a more collective, and that examples reign in the areas of a jury deciding on verdicts and laws. But I still think that understanding has to happen at a personal level in order for everyone to be able to conclude an answer. Being presented information, something we might call knowledge, and then coming to a collective understanding probably does occur at a macro level, but if each person doesn't cognitively get it on their own, then people will be just lying in saying they understand. Even if other people are there to help them understand, without the work being done in their own brain, then there's no understanding. I feel that personal understanding can then be used to create a synthesized group understanding, playing into what Mason described, but saying that personal knowledge must be "grounded" in discourse shared with others seems like it's subject to as many errors as personal understanding. A group of people can misunderstand just as poorly as an individual, sometimes fantastically so, in fact.

Also, I'm sorry Marina, it doesn't look like he thinks there's a unifying rule of understanding :(