The phrase "are understood in" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing how certain concepts, terms, or ideas are interpreted or comprehended within a specific context or framework.
Example: "The principles of physics are understood in the context of classical mechanics and quantum theory."
Alternatives: "are interpreted in" or "are perceived in".
No, because – at least as the terms are understood in English – there's a confusion of category.
Notice that the technologies are understood in this passage as progressive and transformational in and of themselves.
"The marks had an agreed meaning within the building trade, and are understood in the same way as mathematical symbols," she explains.
Indeed, some passages are understood in diametrically opposed ways by different scholars.Confucius lived at a time when the old feudal order had disintegrated into warring satrapies.
He argued that they do not hunger for pluralism and democracy in the way these things are understood in the West.
All of those things are understood in terms of the relationships between electric charges and electric and magnetic fields summarised in Maxwell's equations, published by the Royal Society in 1865, 150 years ago.
"The so-called 'anxiety of influence', whereby authors are understood in terms of their response to canonical precursors, is becoming an 'anxiety of impotence', in which the past exerts a diminishing stylistic influence on the present," they write.
And while good faith is the issue, what practical Western steps or accommodations are understood in NATO Brussels' home-office line that the allies owe Moscow recognition of its "security interests"?
STEVE COLL: The Sunni-Shia divide in the Muslim world and in the Arab Spring is probably the most under-appreciated aspect of events, as they are understood in the United States.
It doesn't require saying one thing and also saying its opposite, but it does require saying more or less the same thing in ways that are understood in different ways.
Sometimes this happens because they are seen with new eyes or because they are understood in new contexts; sometimes it is because they possess an aesthetic grandeur that resists any interpretive grid.
