"mere understanding" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when referring to a basic, incomplete understanding of something, often in comparison to a more comprehensive understanding. For example, "Rather than just relying on mere understanding, I researched and learned as much as I could about the subject."
They insisited on more than mere understanding & in doing so restored breath to a country that seemed close to extinction.
Echoing Lawrence's attack on the "spirit", the "soul" and the "mind" in his terrific third chapter on writer-critics, he reflects powerfully on Thomas De Quincey's remark: "The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted: and yet the great majority trust to nothing else".
Wherever the evidential support relations are more complex, mere understanding of the propositional content of the justifiers will not suffice to issue in justification for a resulting belief.
Neither Bonjour nor Bealer are in fact particularly concerned to defend the analytic by such claims, but their recourse to mere understanding of propositional content is certainly what many defenders of the analytic have had in mind.
As well, one may now have direct introspective knowledge that one has an intuition that p while one has no such direct introspective knowledge regarding one's dispositions, especially one's non-activated dispositions, to believe on the basis of mere understanding.
As society comes to terms with the scientific consensus on climate change, climate scientists are being called on to go beyond a mere understanding of the phenomenon, says climatologist Gregg Garfin, deputy director for science translation and outreach at the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Sentences must therefore signify something else in addition to understandings, something that can do what mere understandings cannot.
The Americans had argued this year to London and Edinburgh that shipping Mr Megrahi back to Libya under the PTA, signed in April, would breach that commitment, which the British had come to regard as a mere "political understanding".
… Is there an alternative to this historical injustice of general theories, on the one hand, and the standardlessness of mere historical understanding, on the other?" The sharp distinction between descriptive and normative concepts of legitimacy is also undermined by the fact that we find normative uses of the concept in social science and descriptive uses in moral, political and legal philosophy.
Specific environmental events can galvanize a response in a way that mere academic understanding seemingly cannot.
An external and semi-miraculous instrumentality is invoked to explain the prodigy whose essence defies mere scientific understanding.
