Understanding Understanding

This book presents the selected results of research on the further development of the shape understanding system (SUS) described in our previous book titled “Shape Understanding System: the First Steps Toward the Visual Thinking Machines”. This is the second book that presents the results of research in the area of thinking and understanding carried out by authors in the newly founded the Queen Jadwiga Research Institute of Understanding. In this book, the new term knowledge implementation is introduced to denote the new method of the meaningful learning in the context of machine understanding. SUS ability to understand is related to the different categories of objects such as the category of visual objects, the category of sensory objects and the category of text objects. In this book, new terms and concepts are introduced in order to describe and explain some issues connected with SUS development. These terms are explained by referring to the content of our books and other our works rather than to existing literature in related areas of research. This book raises many questions that are discussed in the area of cognitive science or philosophy of mind.

The operation of understanding is the fundamental methodical procedure of hermeneutics and is usually seen as contradiction to scientific explanation by the usage of mathematical models. Yet understanding is the basic way in which humans organize their everyday practice, namely by understanding other people and social situations. In this book the authors demonstrate how an integration of hermeneutical understanding and scientific explanation can be done via the construction of suited geometrical models with neural networks of processes of understanding. In this sense the authors develop some kind of mathematical hermeneutics. Connecting links for the integration of the two methodical poles are the developments of particular models of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which are able to perform certain tasks of understanding.