Stephen Downes

I wrote about understanding a few weeks ago to address arguments such as the one here. It should be clear that a hand-wave like "understanding as 'remembering in disguise'" is far from an adequate summation. I liked the use of the Helen Keller story to try to get at what we mean when by understanding, but clearly it's a special case, and does not show that 'understanding' equates to 'knowing the meaning of words'. And none of this goes to show that "understanding entails a certain level of abstraction, what cognitive scientists call schema." And all this is even further from showing that 'humans understand what AI cannot' - indeed, if understanding does reduce to meanings of words, then all an AI needs to 'understand' is a second, non-textual sensory modality. A sense of touch, say, in addition to a set of words.