This is closer to philosophy than science, I think, and should probably be under the "not quite science" portion. Just a thought.
Nevertheless it's interesting, namely because it's thought along these lines that underpins scientific inquiry.
"Understanding ... [is] a personal paradigm."
Agree.
"Knowledge is about truth but understanding is about meaning."
I'm not sure that knowledge has any different relation to the truth than does understanding. Our observations are like pieces of an immense, detailed jigsaw puzzle that have been scattered by a hurricane. We have to look all over for the few we find. We invariably miss the obvious piece stuck in our collar. Our knowledge is the way we have put the few pieces we find together. Our understanding is the picture we think we see emerging.
Neither knowledge nor understanding nor even observation is Truth - and yet, in some sense, all of them (even when they are false) are a kind of truth (small t).
"Understanding is a means for placing the individual within the picture including the entity about which the individual wishes to become very familiar."
I don't think this is a good definition of understanding - at least, I'm having trouble assimilating it, given my own preconceptions of these terms.
Certainly truth is something other than what we have standardized. Probably the best anyone can hope for is understanding. However, people mean different things when they say they "understand" a thing. Some people fit two pieces together and say they understand. Others thing having a LOT of disconnected pieces is understanding. Others have forced some pieces together, the intellectual equivalent of peeling of the colored stickers to solve Rubik's cube.
