Some kinds of understanding cannot be transferred, only cultivated

Evidence

The teacher presents the student with a problem that discursive intelligence cannot solve. The student works with it — sometimes for months, sometimes for years. The teacher’s task is not to explain the kōan but to hold open the space in which the student’s own breakthrough can occur. The teacher does not give the student the answer. The teacher cannot give the student the answer, because the answer — the experiential realization the kōan is designed to precipitate — is not a piece of information that can be transferred. It must arise in the student herself. — , The Rod and the Child, 3945

Categorization

• SEED: A claim about the nature of understanding itself — could anchor an essay on why certain insights resist direct instruction.
• XREF: connects to: Understanding consciousness requires not treating organisms like machines and minds like code. — Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet); Language and culture cannot confer national belonging without shared experience — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 572; Yet, there is scarcely a page of Wittgenstein’s work, including his work on the foundations of mathematics, that is not devoted to an attempt to rescue our understanding of meaning by linking it to the ordinary practices of human beings using language; and the many striking examples of Wittgenstein’s imaginative anthropology are testimony to his commitment to the imaginative nature of rationality. Practice fetishism and particularism may indeed culminate in the denial that human beings can conserve and transmit shared experiences and in a related refusal to recognize the imaginative elements in human rationality. But because these very ideas-how human beings learn a language, how imagination plays a crucial part in that learning-are so much at the center of Wittgenstein’s work, it casts some doubt on whether Winter’s charges of fetishism, among others, are accurate. (+4 more)

Related

• Yet, there is scarcely a page of Wittgenstein’s work, including his work on the foundations of mathematics, that is not devoted to an attempt to rescue our understanding of meaning by linking it… (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Inherited substance without individual creativity decays into empty formalism #complicates (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 514
• Yet, there is scarcely a page of Wittgenstein’s work, including his work on the foundations of mathematics, that is not devoted to an attempt to rescue our understanding of meaning by linking it… #corroborates (0.45)
• Language and culture cannot confer national belonging without shared experience #expands (0.35) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 572