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From: jwl@garnet.berkeley.edu (James Wilbur Lewis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Chinese Room Experiment: empirical tests
Message-ID: <1990Dec4.184809.28874@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 4 Dec 90 18:48:09 GMT
References: <1990Nov26.055429.8883@agate.berkeley.edu> <7989@uwm.edu> <1990Dec3.134710.25467@canon.co.uk>
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In article <1990Dec3.134710.25467@canon.co.uk> wachtel@canon.co.uk (Tom Wachtel) writes:
>In article <1990Nov26.055429.8883@agate.berkeley.edu> jwl@garnet.berkeley.edu (James Wilbur Lewis) writes:
>>I'll buy the idea that you might have a good feel for the syntax of a language
>>after such an intensive program of imitation, but *understanding*, in the sense
>>that Searle uses the term?  No way!
>
>The technique of teaching a foreign language using the target language
>as the sole medium of communication has been around for several decades
>(literally) and is very successful, in general.

In learning by immersion, the foreign text is not the only channel of
communication.  The student can often infer the meaning of a new phrase
from social convention (e.g. the first foreign phrase taught will almost
certainly be some sort of greeting), by gestures (pointing to objects
when teaching their names), and by trial-and-error (taking advantage
of the positive and negative feedback provided by the teacher).

In learning by *imitation* (as discussed here), as opposed to immersion, 
none of these cues are present.  Under those circumstances, I don't see 
any way to assign meaning to the symbols being manipulated, even if we 
assume that the syntax is learnable.  (I'll concede the theoretical
possibility, given a sufficiently large body of foreign text, but
the original proposal stipulated "no analysis, just copying", which
is a pretty tough constraint.)

-- Jim Lewis


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