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From: rapaport@gort.cs.Buffalo.EDU (William J. Rapaport)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Can humans "understand" mathematics?
Keywords: Chinese Room, Formal Symbol Manipulation, Physical Causation
Message-ID: <14698@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 13 Dec 89 19:16:21 GMT
References: <3120@uceng.UC.EDU>
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Reply-To: rapaport@gort.cs.Buffalo.EDU.UUCP (William J. Rapaport)
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In article <3120@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>.. I am struck by the similarity between the Chinese Room and how I felt in ..
>mathematics classes. The .. instructor ..  made squiggly marks, ..  then
>proceded to show the class a set of rules .. [to] transform the squiggly marks
>into other squiggly marks.  .. the symbols began to take on some kind of
>*meaning* for me. .. I didn't just have the syntax, I started to obtain
>semantics. When that occurred, I felt I was "understanding" mathematics.

Precisely this analogy is discussed in:

Rapaport, William J. (1986), ``Searle's Experiments with Thought,''
Philosophy of Science 53:  271-279

and in

Rapaport, William J. (1988), ``Syntactic Semantics:  Foundations
of Computational Natural-Language Understanding,'' in J. H. Fetzer (ed.)
Aspects of Artificial Intelligence (Dordrecht, Holland:  Kluwer Academic
Publishers):  81-131