Indeed, "recognition of a regularity for manipulation" seems like a good definition, and I like how it's consistent with pragmatism. It's also consistent with what I've been saying about understanding. A squirrel recognizes a car in squirrely terms, for its purposes. A human recognizes a car in greater depth, for human purposes. And when scientists observe or measure the moon's orbit around the Earth, they presuppose their concepts which enable them to recognize the patterns.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as understanding. I'm saying that the process of understanding is endless because it's partly subjective. We impose our purposes onto the phenomena in our manipulative recognitions. I made this point in "Atheism and the Endlessness of Explanation."
What I was saying about measurement vs understanding is about a difference in emphasis. Measuring presupposes the concepts and how they recognize the referents in a way that's good enough for scientific or instrumental purposes. But that's different from questioning the presuppositions at a philosophical level, scrutinizing both the conceptual abstractions and the purposes and cultures themselves (both the objective and subjective aspects of understanding). Physicists understand quantum phenomena well enough to predict and to work with them, to some extent, but that doesn't mean they understand them well or well enough for potentially greater purposes.
