Blah blah blah

So, first, I totally failed in regards to the whole "keeping up with this blog" thing. Obviously I tried to pretend that I wasn't failing by posting my papers from college, but...that's cheating. I know this now.

Anyway, I've been thinking about the following:

Understanding. I may end up doing my Div III (senior dissertation for all you non-Hampshire people) on it. Here's the problem: what does it mean to "understand" something? It is not an intentional state ("intentional state" is a fancy philosophical way of saying "thought", although it specifically refers to thoughts about things in the world: for example, when I think to myself "The Eiffel Tower is in Paris" [as I am wont to do] the thought is about the Eiffel Tower. Beliefs are also intentional states, since if you believe something, you believe something about something [once again, my belief that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris is about the Eiffel Tower]), since it doesn't correspond to anything. I.e. when I say "I understand the theory of relativity" I'm not making a statement about anything out there in the world. So maybe "understanding" is a subjective sensation. But no! We can't be wrong about our subjective sensations. But we can be wrong as to whether we do, in fact, understand something, so it seems. We can think we've understood something without understanding it at all. And is the converse possible? Can we not think we understand something when in fact we do? Why is any of this important? Because it's at the core of almost all arguments. Namely, we have to understand something in order for it to mean anything.