Goodman & Understanding

Goodman's articles let us further our thoughts of perception and understanding, and brought me back to a section of Elgin's book. Elgin suggested that in order for us to have knowledge and eventually understand something, we can use someone else's thoughts/knowledge of a subject to further our own understanding. She said, and we agreed that every single person does not have time to investigate every single subject, we would obviously be constatnly investigating and never get to revel in our discoveries, plus we'd die before we were fulfilled. So therefore, Elgin noted that we can use information from others to answer some of our own questions, and from that section of the book, I had to ask how we were to decide whom to trust in this, whose knowledge was considered good enough to support our investigation and how were we to divide those who we should believe and whom we shouldn't... ok, so now that I reminded you all of that, I will say that I was reminded of that with these readings because they were very interpretation based. Though this time it was more abotu establishing the intended meaning of an architect or artist and the meaning someone else derived from the building or peice of artwork when they encountered it. In class today, I brought this up, ut we didn't really discuss who's opinion gets validated and whose gets shut down. I'm not sure I agree that some individual's opinions are worth less than someone else's, which is really funny for me to say because I love being right and have been known to tell people they were wrong because they didn't agree with me... maybe I'm learning so much from this class that I've just become toooooooooo accepting of these notions? Anyway, maybe we can give a minute or two to this again.

As for Understanding Understanding, I believe Mason might eventually explain something related to my question, because he has been defining "understanding" and why it is important to note that different people understand differently, sometimes abstractly and sometimes metaphorically (which I am totally all for, I love using metaphors to explain stuff... though sometimes I make it more complicated). I like the emphasis he puts on the metaphor or "seeing" and that goes for the term "reading" as well. I hate to say I don't have any questions from these chapters, since I felt he was defining/explaining things to set us up for more in the chapters to come, but I'm sure that in class I will realize I do have some, so I'll save those for when they pop up.