Sometimes when I speak with certain people, I find myself having to explain things that seem as obvious as the blue sky, conclusions I would normally regard as common sense. I have to connect points that should have been clear on their own.
On the other hand, I’ve met people, who immediately grasp where I’m going the moment I mention an idea. They just get it.
it almost feels like as if some people were granted the gift of clear understanding. In The Republic, Plato famously addresses this. He posits that God fashioned humans with different souls: some containing gold (those with the capacity for wisdom and governance), others silver (courage and execution), and others iron or bronze (producers and laborers).
No. Please don’t make this judgement because I’ve been in your situation. In one moment the same person who understood you in another time would completely missed your meaning. There are a lot of background prep that we take for granted that’s why sometimes to us something should be understood instantly.
If there’s something to be understood in this phenomenon, it is how we subconsciously place primacy to our mind and not others’.
In college writing, what’s the number one principle we need to use in our written report? Do not assume your readers or audience know what you mean and skip on introduction, no matter how obvious it already is to us.
I’d say it is more likely that those who readily understand us probably share some of the same sense-making values and approaches as we do, rather than having intrinsically enhanced abilities to grasp ideas.
I’m talking about a hierarchical levels of understanding
That’s example
In The Republic, Plato maps human comprehension along a hierarchy. The highest level, Noesis (direct intellection), describes minds that instantly grasp foundational principles without relying on intermediate physical
Plato says up front that his supposedly “noble” lie is just a trick to encourage social harmony. He was bullshitting the masses. Popper rips Plato a new one one this. The metals of the soul were not thought real even by Plato.
So no, you don’t have a “golden soul”, even for Plato. You just came across someone who agrees with you.
But animals do get along because they share something in common, a cat is more likely to bond with another cat than with a bird, if someone strongly disagrees with you on stuff, it can be harder to get along with him.
If I say, “Do you understand?”, I am asking for you to make a claim (y/n), which is then judged in differing ways, depending on the standards that would need to be met for us to accept that you, as you say, “get it” (i.e., you do understand) in a particular case. But since this is a logical conclusion (a judgment that we make), there is no “thing” (my “understanding”) that I have, and so there is no need for any internal mechanism (no “gift”). If the process of understanding, as @Tom_Storm says, is not an “intrinsically enhanced ability”, we could still say there is a skill that one can be better at (making connections, recognizing distinctions, i.e., learning what matters about a practice), or that one would pick something up quicker based on a shared practice or context or experience (echoing @Banno). I would say that philosophy itself is based on the idea that thinking can be taught, bettered, and so is a “process” like problem-solving (working it out over time, or explicitly), rather than a “process”, say, of the brain. And so the metals of a person would be just different areas of skill and interest, rather than intrinsically granted and not attainable by others (as if courage were like blood type rather than like resolve).
The first and most obvious is general intelligence (g) which affects processing speed and working memory. Some people “connect the dots” with minimal prompting while others need intermediate steps made explicit. Just don’t ask me to define it because not even scientists really know what intelligence is.
Then there’s cognitive style. Some people enjoy and engage in effortful thinking (“need for cognition”) and are more likely to spontaneously draw inferences and follow complex arguments. This is about personality.
Also, as others have pointed out, understanding is heavily shaped by existing mental structures. If someone already has the relevant concepts and relations, a brief cue can activate a whole network of inferences. This “expertise effect” is domain-specific and relies on prior exposure or education.
Finally, there are communication issues. Conversation relies on inferring unstated assumptions to some degree (Gricean implicature). Some people are simply better at grasping what’s implied rather than literally said. This can be related to neurodevelopmental conditions also.
All of these complicate the idea that some people are simply better than others.