Here’s a sentence that I have used in my psychology classes over the years as a way of demonstrating the difference between knowledge and understanding:
The haystack was important because the cloth ripped.
Linguists and cognitive psychologists point out that there are hierarchically organized layers to human language, and the sentence above can be read on at least three “levels.” At the surface level, you have the physical sentence itself, the specific words and the order in which they appear. Although the surface level is necessary for any sort of communication at all, the meaning of a sentence cannot be derived from its surface expression alone. The same meanings can be expressed using different words and word orders: the meaning of “My knee hurts because I tripped over the dog” is essentially the same as “Tripping over the dog is the reason my knee hurts” despite the fact that they are distinctly different sentences. In addition, the exact same words in the exact same order can mean completely different things: “They are fighting dogs” can refer to someone sparring with dogs; or it might be referring to a type of dog, specifically the kind of dog that fights. The meaning of a sentence is not to be found on the surface. Meaning has to do with the way the surface features are being organized mentally. Meaning isn’t out there in the world. Meaning is something that has to be built internally—or so the story goes.
But there are levels involved in this as well, levels to the internal meaning construction process. Closest to the surface, you have the propositional level of the sentence, what is sometimes referred to as the “textbase.” This is the level at which syntax and decisions about the meanings of potentially ambiguous words come into play. Is “fighting” a verb or an adjective? This level can provide us with quite a lot of information. Looking at the sentence above in terms of this level of meaning, we have two objects, a haystack and a cloth, and an event, the ripping of the cloth. But we also have information that the haystack is not just any old haystack, it is one that is, or at least was for a period of time, important. And further, we know that there is a causal relationship between the ripping of the cloth and the haystack’s importance, that it was the very fact that the cloth ripped that made the haystack important.
However, despite the fact that we know what all of the entities in the sentence are and how they relate to each other, the sentence is impossible to understand. We are missing something critical that has to do with a deeper level of meaning, the level at which the propositional content of the sentence can be connected to things not included in the sentence, and integrated with our personal experiences and our general knowledge about the world. This deeper level of meaning has been called the situation model level of representation, or sometimes simply the mental model level. What makes this sentence such a good classroom example is that providing a single word is sufficient for this deeper level of meaning to become available in a sudden flash of insight: parachute.
The haystack was important because the cloth ripped. Parachute. Suddenly, not only do you know the relationships among the entities and events in the sentence, but you understand the sentence, you can see it in a larger context that incorporates information that is not part of the word meanings and propositional structure of the sentence itself. You can go beyond the sentence and construct a mental model using your broader experience with the world. You can see the parachute ripping and the skydiver averting sure death by landing on a haystack (the first time I came across this example, I pictured a scene from a Looney Tunes cartoon).
Information, knowledge, and understanding, these terms are frequently used as synonyms. But information is not necessarily knowledge, and, as we have seen, knowledge does not necessarily imply understanding. Information is really just data—potential content for knowledge. Information corresponds to the surface level. Knowing something means, at the very least, that you can do something that you could not do if you didn’t know that thing. Even something as prosaic as knowing that pandas eat bamboo allows you to provide an answer to the question “What do pandas eat?” Knowledge in this minimal sense corresponds to the propositional or textbase level: knowing there is a causal relationship between the ripping of the cloth and the importance of the haystack, for example. Understanding involves the embedding of information and knowledge within a broader context that includes additional information and knowledge—and additional understandings. To gain understanding means to alter, in some perhaps only small and subtle way, your current worldview.
In the last couple decades, our exposure to information has increased by orders of magnitude. But this has occurred in the absence of a concomitant increase in the ability to develop a deeper understanding. Along with the internet’s burgeoning cornucopia of information has come technology for dramatically increasing the efficiency with which we can organize and apply this information. This combination, virtually unlimited access to information coupled with potent algorithm-driven tools for searching, sorting, organizing, and applying this information, creates the illusion that we understand something when really all we have done is acquire surface knowledge about tiny interrelated portions of the stream of information itself. The sheer volume and relentless accumulation of this information is making it more and more difficult to formulate deeper meanings. And what’s worse is that we are left with a false sense that the superficial knowledge that we are able to glean counts as real knowledge—that knowing about how various things and events available in the information stream relate to each other is real understanding.
It may even be that a truly broad situation-model level understanding of current events is impossible to attain. There are simply too many things happening, and the relations among them are too complex for us to be able to integrate them into anything that resembles a stable and coherent worldview. Instead of a comprehensive and nuanced worldview consisting of meaningfully integrated knowledge and understanding, we carry multiple compartmentalized worldviews, many of which are logically incoherent and incompatible with each other, worldviews that are shifting and shallow and over-simplistic, the kind of worldviews that can be encapsulated in sound bites and trite memes.
Access to information is not the same as knowledge, just like eating at five-star restaurants doesn’t make you a chef. And, again, knowledge is not the same as understanding, in the same way that you can know that it was the ripping of the cloth that made the haystack important without any understanding whatsoever about why that was so. The result of all of this is that, where prior generations once strived for an active and penetrating understanding of the world around them, we are now merely passive consumers of information—and we mistake the efficiency with which we can navigate and organize information with meaningful understanding. We know all about haystacks, and about the many ways that different kinds of cloth can rip. And we entirely fail to notice that we are missing the parachute.
