Although I do not speak Mandarin, it was shown I could have a very convincing discussion with a Mandarin speaker without ever understanding a word of my responses.
(Right?) And so, to paraphrase the philosopher Thomas Nagel, whose landmark 1974 paper What Is It Like To Be A Bat? probed the difficulties of ever understanding the conscious experience of life-forms sufficiently different from ourselves … well: What Is It Like To Be A Trump? I'm not the first to wonder.
Faust, who in the legend sells his soul for universal knowledge, was recast as a troubled Paul Ehrenfest, the Austrian physicist who despaired of ever understanding this young man's game in which particles were just smears of probability.
Some kinds of perversity are so bizarre that one despairs of ever understanding them.
In fact, efforts to generalize the model to multielectron atoms had proved futile, and physicists despaired of ever understanding them.
Every now and then a horrific burst of imagination shook him: the cold darkness, the rising hunger, the first and final fear, of dying without ever understanding death.
He wonders how Fusco can purport to accept him "but be diametrically opposed to the country and culture my ancestors are from without ever understanding it".
The more he is plied with enlightenment, the more he loses hope of ever understanding the political mores of America, ancient or modern.
Both had every reason to fund Bellingham until he was driven to make his attempt, without Bellingham ever understanding how they were using him.
Indeed, Richard Byrne's wonderful research into gorilla memes has revealed how apes are able to learn useful behaviours from each other without ever understanding what they are for: the explanation of how ape cognition works really is behaviouristic.
Managing these pressures from people requires, more than ever, understanding what is at stake in terms of the benefits and values associated with coastal waters.
