I wasn't disagreeing with you, just adding some thoughts. However, I do disagree with you here :) I suspect that AI researchers, linguists, theorists of mind,

I wasn't disagreeing with you, just adding some thoughts. However, I do disagree with you here :) I suspect that AI researchers, linguists, theorists of mind, neuropsychologists and many others may take umbrage with your suggestion that exploring the ability to gain knowledge and convert that into "understanding" is pointless beyond philosophy. Perhaps my tone was philosophical, not that I have a problem with that. However I was hoping for someone to dig further into the topics raised rather than dismiss them. I also wasn't "making a point about words" but rather the fields I mention here. Perhaps I should have been more explicit about that. Anyhoo... syntactic recall as a proxy of a practical skill always seems doomed to produce inaccurate results. A job is not like an interview, in many ways. Where does that leave us? It feels that we should be able to interview people in order to separate the suitable from the unsuitable. Perhaps that's not the case, and we're deluding ourselves. I'm reminded of Daniel Kahnemann and the Israeli army recruiting procedure: http://www.businessinsider.com/daniel-kahneman-on-hiring-decisions-2013-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/daniel-kahneman-on-hiring-dec...