Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!edcogsci!cogsci!ht From: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry Thompson) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Chinese room -- Empirical tests Message-ID: Date: 10 Dec 90 14:55:04 GMT References: <74@tdatirv.UUCP> Sender: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk Distribution: comp Organization: HCRC, University of Edinburgh Lines: 40 In-reply-to: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP's message of 5 Dec 90 20:29:01 GMT In article <74@tdatirv.UUCP> sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) writes: > In article ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry Thompson) writes: > >1) Could you learn Chinese (or any other natural language) as a second > >language using ONLY a monolingual Chinese (or ...) dictionary? > > No way. Even if the dictionary had pictures for some of the terms it would > still be wholly inadequate. There is no way to determine the meaning of most > terms simply from the dictionary itself. Also, the examples of the usage in > a dictionary are generally insufficient to derive the full grammar of the > language. > > [I have managed to translate from Russian to English using a *bilingual* > dictionary, but Russian is an Indoeuropean language, and the text was > very simple in structure, with few difficult constructs (like verbs)]. For what it's worth, Harnad disagrees, and, unusually, I concur. We simply observe that what we have been set is not actually a language learning task in the first instance, but rather a code breaking task. With the vast amount of material available in a monolingual dictionary, with a guarantee of no change of code or other tricks, it should actually be a perfectly doable job by the standards of the WWII codebreakers. (I presume today's lot would be less useful, as codes have changed a lot since then in ways I take to be unhelpful for this rather simple, if tedious, task). Once the dictionary had been translated, a bilingual dictionary could be constructed and another tedious, but again perfectly possible in principle, task is all that remains. > >2) How about as a first language? > > No, and for the same reasons. No, but for different reasons. This time it's not a code breaking task, as you don't have a target language to work with. -- Henry Thompson, Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 31 667-1011 x6517 Fax: (44) 31 662-4912 ARPA: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk JANET: ht@uk.ac.ed.cogsci UUCP: ...!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!cogsci!ht