I don't think the purpose has to be conscious or explicit. But the potential purposes are baked into the methods we apply in thinking, conceptualizing, inferring, observing, and testing. The whole culture is brought to bear in our background knowledge, habits, cognitive standards, and so on.

So the question is what understanding would look like, not just without a conscious, explicit purpose, but a working culture that has its implicit collective purposes and presuppositions that trickle down to all the members.