Understanding: It's All Interrogative

In this paper, we propose a new account of understanding. Its guiding idea is that the objects that are understood have the semantic structure of questions. Understanding is achieved by grasping correct and complete answers to these questions. We develop this idea, and then argue that various kinds of propositional, objectual, and explanatory understanding are limiting cases of our “interrogative” account of understanding. In doing so, we also highlight several kinds of understanding that have received scant attention.