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something? There is a thinking process that will help us to specify these conditions. It
may be called alleged understanding, (or misunderstanding), and it occurs whenever
people think they have understood something only later to discover that what they
had concluded was not the case. The key point in a case of misunderstanding is the
fact that one's own predictions or explanations, according to her model or belief
system, turn out not to be the case. Assuming there was not any fault in the inference
process one concludes that there must have been mistaken premises. We see,
therefore, that whenever misunderstanding is reached some mistaken premises must
have been involved. We take this fact to be a strong suggestion that to reach
understanding one's premises -with regard to the task or phenomenon to be
understood- must hold true. Factually, an individual’s premises may be a system of
primitives or not. Consequently, I distinguish between thinking processes that end up
in a system of primitives (ΠH) or in a foundational belief system (that may include
some primitives). The former type of thinking processes I call understanding, the
latter reasoning.33 What both types of thinking have in common is the notion of
mathematical validity.34
There are six reasons supporting the proposed theory of communication and
understanding. First, it provides necessary and sufficient conditions for human
understanding which: (a) capture the fact that understanding always involve the grasp
of meaning; (b) capture the process nature of understanding; (c) capture the two most
significant aspects of the analytic tradition, namely, (c1) systematicity (since
definition-13 implies the existence of a sequence of steps although neither necessarily
formal nor necessarily conscious); and (c2) the requirements of context and
motivation as contributing factors in human understanding; (d) are not in conflict
with the hermeneutic approach. Second, it does not violate the common sense of
understanding as described by most dictionaries and encyclopedias (e.g., Oxford,
Longman, Britannica) and used in both scientific and vernacular language. Third, it
can accommodate both conscious and unconscious understanding. The former can be
quite effortful and take considerable amount of time. Fourth, it naturalises at least
part of the process of human understanding by making the end result of it empirically
investigable. This may well happen through primitives- or premises- based
descriptions and, conceivably, through neural level imaging. Fifth, the integrated
character of understanding seems to be in accordance with the integrated character of
the brain. Specifically, the context dependence of the end result of understanding in
the form of ΠH is in accordance with the context-related functions of the right
hemisphere while the process nature of it seems to be in accordance with the left one
(Bookheimer 2002). Last, and at least equally importantly, the proposed theory can
be straightforwardly generalized to any A taxon. Appropriate taxon primitives can
contribute to the design of methodologies that are less biased towards humans, thus
addressing Emery & Clayton’s (2008) important design requirement of cognitive
tests.
Both as a process and at its end result, understanding can be extremely complex
depending on the depth that the process is required to go to achieve its end result.35
The complexity of the process itself is far beyond the scope of this article. The next
section looks at the complexity of its end result, namely, systems of primitives.
2.1.2.2 On primitives
Definition-13 is cast in terms of “a system of human primitives”. It follows that
an H may have understood a particular topic in terms of several different systems of
primitives. Such systems may be of their own, of someone else’s or of a school of