Abstract

The word "understand" has various meanings which can be specified according to a certain aspect of the language or the act of speaking itself: One can understand a sentence; one can understand what someone is doing by saying something, etc. Hence, "understand" is a systematic ambiguous word. The philosophers who define the notion of understanding draw their attention to either the one or the other meaning of the word. Hence, they define this notion only partially. Consequently, they often talk past one another in case of a controversy. But in fact the different definitions of the notion of understanding are not in actual competition with one another. There are many 'language games' one can play with the word "understand". - Corresponding to this 'liberal' conception, Continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophy can be brought into contact with one another: The followers of the hermeneutics and of the "geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologie" have provided definitions of the notion of understanding which should by all means be taken into account. The followers of the linguistic philosophy have found methods by which the differences between the definitions can be made clearer