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Compare and Contrast
Understanding is a process. Facts, on the other hand, are usually thought of as
static and unchanging. Most people prefer facts. There is comfort in ideas
written in stone. It just feels good to have a sense of certainty in an
uncertain world. The aversion to uncertainty is why people who do not
understand the nature of understanding recoil from the fact that all facts are
contingent upon other facts for their factuality. Information is only factual
when related to other information. Information without context is nonsense
because understanding, like consciousness, is a dynamic, transitional and
relational process.
I remember a little game I played as a child repeating a word over and over
again until the word seemed to lose all meaning. For example, if you repeat the
word "hamburger" often enough in rapid succession, it begins to take on the same
absence of meaning as the nonsense word "zabart." Psychologists call this
semantic satiation. It happens as the clusters of neurons responsible for
processing the context of the word habituate to the repetition. When these
neurons temporarily fail to respond in the usual way, the word loses meaning.
Context is essential because understanding is a dynamic, translational and
relational process.....
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