“I was – like I suppose many of us – brought up in a particular model or paradigm that in order to act you have to understand first. This was knocked into me at school, it was my science education; that the world was a place which if you understood it properly you could act on. And it was a long time before I realised that a lot of the time we act in order to understand: You learn to swim by starting, you don’t learn to swim by studying – although studying can help you a bit and can help you improve and so on. I am not denying the value of studying, but I am denying the primacy of understanding in order to be able to act. I think that in a lot of what we do we act in order to understand and that these two really fit together in a circle.”
Reference: Ranulph Glanville (2012), Presentation during Panel on Reflexivity, 2012 Joint ASC/BIG Conference “An Ecology of Ideas”, 10-July-2012, Asilomar, California.
