Toward an Organizational Theory of Scientific Understanding

Scientific understanding has long occupied a central position within the philosophy of science, yet its nature remains the subject of continuing debate. Existing accounts variously associate understanding with successful explanation, predictive ability, theoretical coherence, intelligibility, or the capacity to answer counterfactual questions. Although each perspective captures important aspects of scientific practice, no consensus has emerged concerning what scientific understanding fundamentally consists in. This paper proposes an organizational account of scientific understanding grounded in Generative Continuum Ontology (GCO). It argues that scientific understanding is achieved through the progressive integration of organizational relations into coherent conceptual frameworks that increasingly disclose the organization of reality. From this perspective, understanding is neither identical to explanation nor reducible to prediction or intelligibility. Rather, prediction identifies organizational regularities, explanation discloses the organizational relations responsible for those regularities, and understanding integrates these relations into coherent organizational knowledge. Scientific understanding therefore represents the cumulative expansion of organizational coherence through which reality becomes progressively intelligible.