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From: ftoomey@maths.tcd.ie (Fergal Toomey)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai
Subject: Re: Understanding is not a function of behaviour
Keywords: New Argument
Message-ID: <1990Apr10.130006.6780@maths.tcd.ie>
Date: 10 Apr 90 13:00:06 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Maths, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
Lines: 48

I've been doing some thinking about the "understanding" problem since
I posted the first article about the chess game. I think the chess game
argument is a fairly good one, but evidently there are plenty of people
who find it less than convincing. Therefore, I'm going to give a new,
stronger argument for my position, put my hard hat on, and dig in for
a long, long summer.	:-)

The discussion is about whether or not understanding can be inferred
from behaviour, ie. if I win a lot of chess games, do I neccessarily
understand chess? I instinctively feel that behaviour does not imply
understanding, mainly because of the many unfortunate conclusions this
position leads you to. For example, a plane can fly, I cannot. Does
this mean that a plane understands aerodynamics better than I do?
I would say that, certainly, the plane obeys the laws of aerodynamics
in a way in which I do not. Similarly, a simple chess program obeys certain
rules of thumb when formulating a strategy, but this does not mean that
it understands those rules anymore than an aeroplane understands
aerodynamics.

Now, as human beings, we understand things, I think we can all agree
on that. Therefore, part of out behaviour, which may or may not be
apparent to an observer (my opponents would say that it is) is to
understand. Whether or not this particular part of our behaviour is
observable by an outsider, it is certainly observable to us ourselves.
Hence there is no doubt that understanding is a part of human
behaviour.

In fact, on the whole, we succeed quite well in understanding many
different things. Therefore, if you believe that understanding is
implied by behaviour, then you must believe that we humans understand
how to understand, in the same way that a chess playing computer
understands how to play chess. But this isn't true. We do not
understand how to understand. If we did, the problem of the CR
would never have arisen, and AI would have been finished off years
ago. Chess would be no problem, Gary Kasparov could have written
a book explaining how to understand chess, and we'd all be grandmasters.

So if we assume from our behaviour that we can understand how to
understand, then we are faced with the contradiction that, from our
behaviour, it is clear that we do not understand how to understand.
So we must reject our hypothesis, and state that behaviour does not
neccessarily imply understanding.

Your opinions on this argument are welcome.

Fergal Toomey.

Imagine something you can't imagine. Now explain how you imagined it.