Mason, Ch. 4

"...more understanding must be better than less, and that perfect transparency is an ideal. Such views might have played an ideological role in the development of the sciences. An obvious exception might be in understanding ourselves and others." p.52
Generally, humans strive for more understanding, and transparency (which, I believe, then leads to understanding) is then a good thing. I think Mason is striving to decipher why humans attempt to gain understanding. In an ideal world, such a drive for this understanding created the sciences. Perhaps this drive for understanding is also linked to the creation of the arts, as we discussed in class today. The arts and science are not singular ways to knowledge, and it may be that the artist creates his/her work in an effort to understand the subject, or to share his/her understanding with others.

"One conclusion that might seem to follow is that a desire for understanding is, or should be, wholly relativized. What needs to be understood will depend entirely on the assumptions within a society at a particular time. As concepts develop, what we want to understand will change." p.54
Mason begins to explain by stating that some of this must be true and proven by common sense. His time travel example is such. I think that this is not only true for eras, but also for lifespans. Children want to understand far less than their adult counterparts. Cognition and comprehension grow then in parallel bounds with understanding, which is linked to the articles we read for lab today. Thus, time is a severe and debilitating limitation both in cognition and understanding.

"Something is intelligible if someone can understand it. If someone can understand something, then it is intelligible. So is intelligibility a sort of property? If so, is it a property of whatever is understood, or a property that depends on some degree on a relation to a person who is doing the understanding?" p.56
These statements seem to be a bit of a conundrum, one that closely resembles the chicken-and-the-egg example. However, Mason does not seem to imply that intelligibility and understanding are synonyms; rather, that without one, the other does not exist. If a concept is unintelligible, it follows then that it can not be understood. He goes on to state that intelligibility depends upon an individual....thus, it is a property of the person, not the concept. So it seems, understanding, like truth, is universal and not to be contained by the limitations of an individual.