Understanding

Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object. Understanding is a relation between the knower and an object of understanding. Understanding implies abilities and dispositions with respect to an object of knowledge sufficient to support intelligent behavior.

Understanding is often, though not always, related to learning concepts, and sometimes also the theory or theories associated with those concepts. However, a person may have a good ability to predict the behaviour of an object, animal or system — and therefore may, in some sense, understand it — without necessarily being familiar with the concepts or theories associated with that object, animal or system in their culture. They may, indeed, have developed their own distinct concepts and theories, which may be equivalent, better or worse than the recognised standard concepts and theories of their culture.

Someone who has a more sophisticated understanding, more predictively accurate understanding, and/or an understanding that lets them make explanations that others commonly judge to be better, of something, is said to understand that thing "deeply". Conversely, someone who has a more limited understanding of a thing is said to have a "shallow" understanding. However, the depth of understanding required to usefully participate in an occupation or activity may vary greatly.

For example, consider multiplication of integers. Starting from the most shallow level of understanding, we have (at least) the following possibilities:

For the purpose of operating a cash register at McDonald's, a person does not need a very deep understanding of the multiplication involved in calculating the total price of two Big Macs. However, for the purpose of contributing to number theory research, a person would need to have a relatively deep understanding of multiplication — along with other relevant arithmetical concepts such as division and prime numbers.

It is possible for a person, or a piece of "intelligent" software, that in reality only has a shallow understanding of a topic, to appear to have a deeper understanding than they actually do, when the right questions are asked of it. The most obvious way this can happen is by memorisation of correct answers to known questions, but there are other, more subtle ways that a person or computer can (intentionally or otherwise) deceive somebody about their level of understanding, too. This is particularly a risk with artificial intelligence, in which the ability of a piece of artificial intelligence software to very quickly try out millions of possibilities (attempted solutions, theories, etc.) could create a misleading impression of the real depth of its understanding. Indeed, supposed AI software could in fact come up with impressive answers to questions that were difficult for unaided humans to answer, without really understanding the concepts at all, simply by dumbly applying rules very quickly. (However, see the Chinese room argument for a controversial philosophical extension of this argument.)

...
Wikipedia