Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Hayes vs. Searle
Message-ID: <2703@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 6 Jun 90 18:12:17 GMT
References: <16875@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <2629@skye.ed.ac.uk> <13772@venera.isi.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 60

In article <13772@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
>In article <2629@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>>
>>The AI community must be pretty annoyed with Searle by now.  He
>>writes papers, gives talks, inspires newspaper articles. In the
>>UK (at least), he even hosted his own philosophical chat show.
>>And throughout it all he refuses to accept that his simple little
>>argument just doesn't show what he thinks it does.

>                                 The whole reason Searle's pot keeps
>boiling is that everyone thinks that issues like "understanding" can
>be resolved by a simple appeal to intuition . . . if only we finally
>figure out the right angle from which to view things.  What if there
>IS no "right angle?"

I think this is an important point, but it cuts both ways.  Those who
think they have refuted Searle shouldn't suppose they have shown that
computers really can understand.  [And that they don't need to show
that to refute Searle.]  In a sense, what Searle has done is to
puncture the Turing Test "if it types like it understands then it does
understand" balloon.  His pot keeps boiling because people keep trying
to reinflate the balloon with the system reply, the robot reply,
various combinations of the two, and so on.

Indeed, I don't think we know enough about what, if anything,
understanding in humans amounts to, or about what programs that could
pass the Turing test would look like (if they are possible at all)
to arrive at a definite conclusion about whether or not computers
can understand.  And, as you suggest, one way it might turn out
is that "understanding" wasn't really a fruitful question to ask.

>What if "understanding" is, by its very nature,
>a rather vague and sloppy word which we can use socially because the
>dynamics of discourse can keep up from wandering too far off the track
>but which may never be able to pin down in any serious analytic sense?

I think we have to be careful about this line of reasoning lest
we start to think the right thing to do would be to find a precise
definition of understanding.  Making definitions before we know
more about it seems to me rather pointless.

>There is a new view of computer science which I seem to have discovered
>independently of several colleagues who have made similar observations
>in different contexts.  The way I like to formulate it is that we study
>computer science in order to get a better grasp on what we are talking
>about.

I agree with this as well.  One of the great advantages of computer
models is that they can force you to say what you mean in sufficient
detail.

>John Pollock has observed that the computer is now a sufficiently powerful
>tool that one can no longer do epistemology from the comfort of one's
>armchair.  Any theory of epistemology today must be held up to the test
>of validation through a computer model (or so says Pollock). 

Has anyone actually made a model of an epistemological theory?
I'd like to know more about this.

-- Jeff