 The first Aristotelian analysis takes understanding to be the mind’s acquisition of the form of the object that is understood, without its matter. For an understanding to be about some thing—say, a cat—is for the form of the cat to be in the mind or intellective soul. The inherence of the form in matter makes the matter to be a thing of a certain kind, so that the inherence of the form cat in matter produces an actual cat, whereas the (immaterial) inherence of the form cat in the mind transforms the mind into an understanding of a cat: the mind becomes (formally) identical with its object. Since the ‘aboutness’ of understanding is analyzed as the commonness or identity of form in the understanding and the thing understood, we may call this approach the conformality theory of understanding. This theory captures the intuition that understanding somehow inherits or includes properties of what is understood, by reducing the intentionality of understanding to the objective identity of the form in the mind and the form in the world.