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From: sp299-ad@violet.berkeley.edu (Celso Alvarez)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.ai
Subject: Re: What's the Chinese room problem?
Message-ID: <1989Oct5.080214.7683@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 5 Oct 89 08:02:14 GMT
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In article <15336@bcsaic.UUCP> rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik) writes:

CA> Much more than thoughts are evoked by language.  How do you translate
CA> the signalling of identity, roles, and social relationships?

RW>I think that such concepts have to be represented as thought structures,
RW>since they have an impact on language structure.

If you're talking about (mental) typifications of social relationships,
that's one thing.  Typifications generate expectations which underly the
production and interpretation of talk.  But the signalling of identity
etc. is a situated process, and by this I imply that there may be no
matching between typifications and actual behavior.  Additionally,
certain linguistic markers of social dimensions are inherently ambiguous
(this ambiguity may be of a different kind than lexical ambiguity).
I don't know how you can translate social markers unless you establish
certain universals (or, at least, certain generalizable transcultural
principles) of socio-interactional meanings.  I don't think you can do
this without incorporating context as a variable in those universals.
And I'm not sure that even then you can give account of the dynamic
reconstitution of those general principles (thought structures?)
in and through context, during the course of an interaction.

Celso Alvarez
sp299-ad@violet.berkeley.edu