Originally Posted by Ken G

No, he says, "yes, that is obviously true." The circle in the mind has always been there, it is the way he developed the ability to identify circles. Otherwise, all he could do is recall items that have been associated with that label.

This can be shown by an example. If I tell you that 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and 17 are the first seven "prime numbers", you could then identify those numbers as prime if you saw them somewhere else. But what would you need to do to identify 19 as prime? You would need to notice some characteristic of these numbers, in this case a mathematical property. Once you notice that property, you have created a model for what a "prime number" is (in mathematics, we can skip this and refer directly to the definition, but with reality, we never see the "rule book"). To the extent that this model works when applied to other numbers, you will say you "understand" prime numbers. But without that model of what primeness means, you would never have any hope of finding other prime numbers. It is just the same with circles, their mathematical property is just a little simpler to notice than the property that makes a number prime. No model, no capacity to generalize, no understanding.