The notion of understanding is pivotal in the humanities and the social sciences. But what does it mean to understand something? The logical grammar of “understanding” seems to suggest that we understand something as something, i.e. as falling under a certain concept. We understand a sentence like “this is red” if we are able to assign it a place in our conceptual framework. This amounts to acknowledging certain consequences that follow from this sentence being true such as “this is coloured”, “this has the same colour as blood” and “this is not green”. In other words, it looks like a necessary condition of understanding that we can make explicit pertinent bits of knowledge.