Entry 33 of 44
Learning
leornian — to get knowledge, to study; Proto-Germanic: liznona
Old English
From Old English leornian: to get knowledge by study, to be cultivated. Proto-Germanic *liznona. Root concept: the acquisition of knowledge or skill through experience that changes how one understands and responds to the world — genuine updating of a knower.
Established meaning
In cognitive science and education: the process by which experience produces durable changes in knowledge, behavior, or capability. Learning implies a learner — an agent whose internal state changes in response to experience, who can apply what was learned in novel contexts, and who can recognize when prior learning was wrong.
AI industry deployment
'Machine learning,' 'deep learning,' 'the model learns from data.' Applied to gradient descent optimization on training corpora. The system's parameters are updated to reduce loss on training examples. Whether this constitutes learning in any cognitively substantive sense is an unresolved question treated as resolved by the terminology.
Semantic gap
The learner and the updating
Genuine learning produces a knower who can recognize error and update in context. Parameter optimization produces a function that performs well on training distribution. These are not the same thing. The term imports the credibility of genuine knowledge acquisition to describe a statistical optimization process.