Understanding implies abilities and dispositions with respect to an object of knowledge that are sufficient to support intelligent behavior.
[10] To understand something implies abilities and dispositions with respect to an object of knowledge that are sufficient to support intelligent behavior.
But it is more demanding in that it requires that the internal connections among ones' beliefs actually be "seen" or "grasped" by the person doing the understanding when found at a deeper level.
For example, we understand why day and night exist because we have a simple model—the rotation of the earth—that explains a tremendous amount of data—changes in brightness, temperature, and atmospheric composition of the earth.
This perspective on comprehension forms the foundation of some models of intelligent agents, as in Nello Cristianini's book "The Shortcut", where it is used to explain that machines can understand the world in fundamentally non-human ways.