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The Queen Jadwiga Research Institute of
Understanding (QJRIU) was
established as a part of the Queen Jadwiga
Foundation. The Queen Jadwiga Research
Institute of Understanding is aimed at creating a suitable environment for
research concerning all aspects of understanding. The aim of The Queen Jadwiga Research Institute of Understanding is to carry
out original research that investigates different aspects of understanding,
and exchanging obtained research results.
QJRIU Research Council
List of publications
Research
Journal
of Understanding
Understanding
is power that enables objects to be thought. Understanding and thought were
topics of philosophical thinkers (e.g. Aristotle, Locke, Hume,
Berkeley, Leibniz, Kant, Popper). The classical preoccupation
with forms and universals was concerned with generality of thought. This
spawned a whole class of general or potentially general entities such as
forms, universals, essences and sensible species. According to Aquinas, the
direct object of human intellectual knowledge is the form abstracted from
matter, which is the principle of individuation, and known through the
universal concept. The senses apprehend the individual thing but the mind
apprehends it only indirectly, as represented in an image or phantasm.
There is no intellectual intuition of the individual thing as such. Scotus discarded the traditional Augustinian-Franciscan
theory of a special divine illumination and held, with Aquinas, that
Aristotelian doctrine of the abstraction of the universal can explain the
genesis of human knowledge without it being necessary to invoke either
innate ideas or a special divine illumination. According to Kant
understanding is one of the higher faculties of knowledge.
In hermeneutics
understanding is the inversion of a speech act, during which the thought
that was the basis of the speech must become conscious. Every utterance has
a dual relationship to the totality of the language and to the whole
thought of its originator, then understanding also consists of the two
moments, of understanding the utterance as derived from language, and as a
fact in the thinker.
More
recently, Jean Piaget specified four stages through which he said
individuals construct an understanding of reality by means of internalized,
reversible mental operations that act on the world to produce a cognitive
independence from physical appearance.
1. The first
stage, sensory-motor thought, is characterized by physical interactions
with objects and the development of the concept that objects exist
independently of one's perception of or interaction with them.
2. The
second stage, preoperational thought, is characterized by internal
representation involving symbols but limited mainly to the present and to
self-centered interpretation.
3. The third
stage, concrete operational thought, is characterized by the notable
independence of thinking and reasoning from self and physical appearance.
Logical thinking appears at this time.
4. The final
stage, formal operational thought, is typified by systematic, formal
deductive thinking and by a complete independence from appearance.
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