I want to block some common misunderstandings about "understanding": In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word "understanding."

We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

"Akrasia" [weakness of will] in rational beings is as common as wine in France.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.