Abstract
Intelligence, the ability to understand, is easily the most highly valued of our mental faculties. Who would not rather admit lapses of memory, or even lack of imagination, than weakness of understanding? Stupidity, i.e. the chronic inability to understand anything beyond the trivial, cannot be redeemed by prodigious feats of memory, or compensated for by vivid flights of fancy. We might not agree with Aristotle that understanding is something divine in us, but we must concede that, moral virtues apart, “in power and virtue it far surpasses all the rest”.1
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Notes
Nicomachean Ethics, X. 7, 1 178a.
Paul Ziff, Understanding Understanding. Ithaca and London: Cornell U.P., 1972.
J.L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses” in Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961 (p. 128 ).
See Paul Ziff, Semantic Analysis. Ithaca and New York: Cornell U.P., 1960 (pp. 90ff.).
I have addressed this particular topic in “Understanding People” in Culture Theory (eds. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine). Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1984 (pp. 200–213).
“Verbs and Times” in Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, New York: Cornell U.P., 1967 (pp. 97–121).
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Vendler, Z. (1994). Understanding Misunderstanding. In: Jamieson, D. (eds) Language, Mind, and Art. Synthese Library, vol 240. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8313-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8313-8_2
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