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From: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, Strong AI, and Chinese Rooms
Message-ID: <1304@ucl-cs.uucp>
Date: 23 Nov 90 11:20:53 GMT
Sender: news@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Lines: 23


I said
> Why Chinese? Is this is a Red Herring (or racism)? Why not French,
> Serbo-Croat or Swedish?  The fact that Chinese use pictograms rather
> than letters is irrelevant to the arguments.

Somebody suggested that this revealed my own xenophobia. Another said
that Searle's thrust was to present a language that was very foreign
in every sense, that is in syntax, idiom, grammar and so on.

In response, I would like to suggest "The BSL Room". The operator in
room cannot speak British Sign Language but has a method of reading
the signs and giving answers back in BSL.

Sign is a language in its own right. It is not a one-to-one mapping
onto, say, English. BSL and ASL (American SL) are different languages.

Note also that Belgian Sign is used by both the Flemish and French
communities.

Gordon Joly                                       +44 71 387 7050 ext 3716
InterNet: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk          UUCP: ...!{uunet,ukc}!ucl-cs!G.Joly
Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, LONDON WC1E 6BT