Understanding Understanding: The Gatekeeping of Machine Intelligence

This academic text by language philosopher Bry Willis outlines a thesis and structure for a paper examining how the term understanding is used to categorically exclude large language models from human-like competence. The author argues that understanding acts as a 'contestably' defined gatekeeper, allowing critics to shift goalposts whenever an AI passes a specific operational test. By analysing various scholarly sources, the text suggests a necessity gap exists where human communicative intent is treated as self-authenticating, while machine success is unfairly demoted to mere simulation. The source further identifies a scope asymmetry in which human failures are viewed as local, yet model failures are used to justify a global denial of ability. Ultimately, the work serves as a diagnostic critique of the linguistic mechanisms used to maintain a human monopoly on comprehension without providing necessary or stable criteria. This scaffold provides a rigorous roadmap for challenging the current philosophical and technical boundaries between biological and artificial intelligence.👉 http://philosophics.blog👉 https://substack.com/@brywillis634737