In four experiments, we tested the community-of-knowledge hypothesis, that people fail to distinguish their own knowledge from other people’s knowledge. In all the experiments, despite the absence of ...any actual explanatory information, people rated their own understanding of novel natural phenomena as higher when they were told that scientists understood the phenomena than when they were told that scientists did not yet understand them. In Experiment 2, we found that this occurs only when people have ostensible access to the scientists’ explanations; the effect does not occur when the explanations exist but are held in secret. In Experiment 3, we further ruled out two classes of alternative explanations (one appealing to task demands and the other proposing that judgments were mediated by inferences about a phenomenon’s understandability). In Experiment 4, we ruled out the possibility that the effect could be attributed to a pragmatic inference.
This book studies David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry has, contrary to its author's expressed wishes, long lived in the shadow of its predecessor, A Treatise of Human ...Nature. This book presents the Enquiry in a fresh light, and aims to raise it to its rightful position in Hume's work and in the history of philosophy. It argues that the Enquiry is not, as so often assumed, a mere collection of watered-down extracts from the earlier work. It is, rather, a coherent work with a unified argument; and, when this argument is grasped as a whole, the Enquiry shows itself to be the best introduction to the lineaments of its author's general philosophy. This book offers a careful guide through the argument and structure of the work. It shows how the central sections of the Enquiry offer a critique of the dogmatic empiricisms of the ancient world (Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Aristotelianism), and set in place an alternative conception of human powers based on the sceptical principles of habit and probability. These principles are then put to work, to rule out philosophy's metaphysical ambitions and their consequences: religious systems and their attendant conception of human beings as semi-divine rational animals. Hume's scepticism, experimentalism, and naturalism are thus shown to be different aspects of the one unified philosophy — a sceptical version of the Enlightenment vision.
The current study examined the associations between actual, assumed, and perceived understanding and partners’ levels of dyadic adjustment. One hundred fifty‐two couples provided questionnaire data ...(assumed and perceived understanding), participated in a videotaped conflict interaction, and in a video‐review task to assess actual understanding (empathic accuracy). The data were analyzed by means of the Actor‐Partner Interdependence Model. The results suggest that (a) some aspects of how well someone assumes that (s)he has understood the partner during a preceding conflict interaction were positively associated with his/her own objective level of understanding (actor effect), (b) that someone's perception of how understood (s)he feels was not associated with the partner's objective level of understanding (partner effect), and (c) perceived understanding, but not actual understanding, was positively associated with dyadic adjustment.
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