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Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
Circularity is a central charge some philosophers make against inner theories of meaning, where we are said to essentially do an inner lookup against a mental filing cabinet to understand a word, a diagram, and so on. The problem is that the inner lookup is offered as an explanation for how we understand something, but it must presuppose the understanding that it sets out to explain.
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I do not have that problem, for I do not need to say how I understand, I only need to be able to notice when I understand. A model does not need to say how it is understood, it suffices to understand it. As I said, the philosophy only bogs the process down, and that's why science doesn't use it. That pretty much sums up this exchange.
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Discovering the “how” will involve more than just drawing an analogy to a person retrieving a file form a filing-cabinet.
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I quite agree, and I don't think we are even remotely close to answering that at this point in time. It simply is not the scientific question on the table at this juncture.
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In that broader context we can see that understanding is a form of success in life.
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Obviously, but that tells me nothing useful or interesting about understanding that separates it from, say, sleeping.
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You would have me ask the student what his model is. He tells me. I complain to you, “Those are just words. Where is the model?”
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And I answer, "if you can't see, then I can't help you. Too bad you have simply chosen to be so crippled in the use of models." That's my bottom line: why would you make that choice? I see no sense in it at all. If a perspective is crippling rather than empowering, why adopt it? How does that give you "success in life" (other than success in filling behavioral journals)?