BI 225 Henk De Regt: Understanding in Machines and Humans

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Nov 19, 2025

In this discussion with Henk De Regt, a Professor of Philosophy of Science, listeners explore the nature of understanding in both humans and machines. Henk emphasizes that genuine scientific understanding hinges on both theory and contextual skills. He delves into the historical neglect of understanding in favor of explanation, and tackles whether machines can possess understanding through behavior-based benchmarks. The conversation also touches on the importance of metaphors, the degrees of understanding, and how public comprehension differs from expert insight.

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INSIGHT

Understanding Is Skill-Based And Contextual

Scientific understanding requires theory-based explanations plus the skills to use them.
Understanding is contextual and depends on the abilities of the understander.

ANECDOTE

Schrödinger Sparked The Intelligibility Inquiry

Henk traced his interest in intelligibility to studying Schrödinger and debates in early quantum theory.
Schrödinger insisted theories must be visualizable to provide genuine understanding.

INSIGHT

Models Make Theories Intelligible

Models bridge theory and phenomena and provide understanding when applied via an intelligible theory.
Intelligibility is a pragmatic trait tied to a scientist's ability to use and visualize a theory.

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Henk de Regt is a professor of Philosophy of Science and the director of the Institute for Science in Society at Radboud University. Henk wrote the book on Understanding. Literally, he wrote what has become a classic in philosophy of science, Understanding Scientific Understanding.

Henks' account of understanding goes roughly like this, but you can learn more in his book and other writings. To claim you understand something in science requires that you can produce a theory-based explanation of whatever you claim to understand, and it depends on you having the right scientific skills to be able to work productively with that theory - for example, making qualitative predictions about it without performing calculations. So understanding is contextual and depends on the skills of the understander.

There's more nuance to it, so like I said you should read the book, but this account of understanding distinguishes it from explanation itself, and distinguishes it from other accounts of understanding, which take understanding to be either a personal subjective sense - that feeling of something clicking in your mind - or simply the addition of more facts about something.

In this conversation, we revisit Henk's work on understanding, and how it touches on many other topics, like realism, the use of metaphors, how public understanding differs from expert understanding, idealization and abstraction in science, and so on.

And, because Henk's kind of understanding doesn't depend on subjective awareness or things being true, he and his cohorts have begun working on whether there could be a benchmark for degrees of understanding, to possibly asses whether AI demonstrates understanding, and to use as a common benchmark for humans and machines.

0:00 - Intro 10:13 - Philosophy of explanation vs understanding 14:32 - Different accounts of understanding 20:29 - Henk's account of understanding 26:47 - What counts as intelligible? 34:09 - Hodgkin and Huxley alternative 37:54 - Familiarity vs understanding 44:42 - Measuring understanding 1:02:53 - Machine understanding 1:16:39 - Non-factive understanding 1:23:34 - Abstraction vs understanding 1:31:07 - Public understanding of science 1:41:35 - Reflections on the book