Artificial intelligence engineers have developed artifacts that succeed at tasks generally thought to require great intelligence, but have yet to mechanize the common, everyday abilities of human cognition, including its central feature: understanding. Humans understand the world, their lives, and abstract ideas in ways that other animals and engineering artifacts do not. This book examines the phenomenon of human understanding and offers an approach to understanding understanding itself. The process of understanding requires essential abilities we share with other mammals, but that are not...