Why We Care About Understanding: Competence Through Predictive Compression

With Pierre Beckmann.

Offers a unifying account of understanding by reverse-engineering the function of both the state and the concept. Arges that we care about understanding because it grounds robust competence. Our concept of understanding evolved as an efficient proxy to track this elusive property, allowing us to identify who to trust and learn from. This highlights the sociality of understanding and how it shapes the character of human understanding. Understanding is the result of convergent pressures to predict the world using cognitive models that are not only accurate, but also compressed enough to be stored, demonstrated, and transmitted.

epistemology, social epistemology, understanding, conceptual change, compression, competence

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