Bounded Understanding Is Still Understanding

Shiffrin et al. (2026) argue that scientists’ understanding is frequently illusory. We agree that genuine metacognitive errors exist: scientists do confuse correlation with causation, mistake predictive success for explanatory insight, and overestimate their explanatory depth. However, the target article extends the label well beyond such errors, conflating genuine mistakes with two distinct phenomena: structural understanding misclassified as shallow causal explanation, and scope-dependent effects mistaken for absent ones. We argue that recognizing bounded understanding as bounded, rather than labeling it illusory, better equips scientists to specify what question they are asking—and whether their analysis answers it.