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From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: more Chinese Room
Message-ID: <6156@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 13 Jan 90 14:25:46 GMT
References: <4921.25ad37f7@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 33

From article <4921.25ad37f7@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk>, by ian@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk:
>...
>Rather than an argument, I will proffer an example of such a phenomenon.
>From time to time, during human history, writings from long-extinct
>civilisations have been found (for example Mayan codices, Runes or Egyptian
>hieroglyphics).  All the information that the translators had to work with
>were the rules they could deduce from the information.  With just this
>syntactic knowledge, they deduced the semantic content.  Isn't this exactly
>what Searle says cannot be done?  Code-breakers (for example Turing :-) must
>have to do a similar task.

I don't think it's possible to break a language code with only written
samples of the code.  The decipherers of ancient scripts have arrived at
meanings only through correspondences with known languages or pictorial
information.  For instance, in the decipherment of Linear B, Ventris
managed to arrive at the *pronunciation* of the script without having
much substantial information about meaning (only some conjectures about
place names) or the identity of the language transcribed.  A
confirmation of his decipherment was Bennet's discovery of a tablet with
a word which in Ventris' system came out ti-ri-po-do accompanied by a
picture of a tripod.  Without the correspondence to Greek or the
picture, it's hard to imagine how the meaning of this word could ever
have become known.

The relationship between script and pronunciation is systematic.  The
relationship between pronunciation and meaning for the primitive
units of a human language is not.

This might have been relevant to the CR question if semantic information
were not already incorporated into the Rules of the Room.  But of
course it must be, since the Room converses intelligently.

				Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu