How Do We Understand

In the name of Allah The Beneficent The Merciful

We are endowed with the potential to conceptualize meanings.  Words are the basic units which the intellect organizes and connects them to each other in order to form meaningful information which informs us in our quest for understanding and making judgment.  

Our mind cannot work in a vacuum, there should be some deposits of information and knowledge in our mind so that we can use them to understand new experiences.  Through our interactions, beginning right after we were born, we uploaded data and information into our mind via our five external senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch).  The contents of our mind depended very much on our parents, our culture, our community, our education, our belief, our psychology, and our environment.  As we grew older, words, concepts and information in our mind increase, therefore, we become more able to understand with more depth and breadth.  

These concepts and information in our mind become our reference when we try to understand new experience or to make judgment.  For example, to understand the meaning of a word 'axiology', we try to find words and concepts in our mind which are related to axiology.  If we cannot find words or concepts in our mind which we can relate to 'axiology', then we cannot understand the meaning of axiology.

In other words, the Intellect has a potential for understanding meaning of and attaining knowledge from the data fed into it through sense perception.  The data perceived and gathered through the senses is transferred to the intellect where it is retained and stored in memory.  Sense perception is like input devices of a computer through which data is loaded into the computer’s memory ready to be processed by the computer’s central processing unit.  Data perceived by the senses is retained in the retentive imagination.  Thinking process started when the perceived sets of data is matched to the sets of related data stored in memory in order to recognize it.  This set of related data is called information.  Thinking process involved in order to recognize information perceived by the senses is recalling which not necessarily involves understanding.  Information is useless until it is put into context and processed by thinking faculty. Knowledge is a result of interpreting and understanding a body of information. Understanding meaning of and attaining knowledge from the information perceived by the senses requires thinking.

Concisely, understanding involves making relationships or connections between ideas and concepts in our mind so that we can make judgment on the proper place of the object understood in the system of things.