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From: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael maxwell)
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Searle, Turing, Symbols, Categories
Message-ID: <732@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Oct-86 12:01:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: bcsaic.732
Posted: Tue Oct 14 12:01:44 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Oct-86 22:05:22 EDT
References: <158@mind.UUCP> <150@cwrudg.UUCP> <160@mind.UUCP> <2495@utai.UUCP> <167@mind.UUCP>
Reply-To: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael maxwell)
Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle
Lines: 22
Xref: mnetor net.ai:1191 net.cog-eng:286

In article <167@mind.UUCP> harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) writes:
>...since there is no
>evidence at all that either capacities or contexts are modular.

Maybe I'm reading this out of context (not having read your books or papers),
but could you explain this statement?  I know of lots of evidence for the
modularity of various aspects of linguistic behavior.  In fact, we have a
parser + grammar of English here that captures a large portion of English
syntax, but has absolutely no semantics (yet).  That is, it could parse
Jabberwocky or your article (well, I can't quite claim that it would parse
*all* of either one!) without having the least idea that your article is
meaningful whereas Jabberwocky isn't (apart from an explanation by Humpty
Dumpty). On the other hand, it wouldn't parse something like "book the table
on see I", despite the fact that we might make sense of the latter (because
of our world knowledge).  Likewise, human aphasics often show similar deficits
in one or another area of their speech or language understanding.  If this
isn't modular, what is?  But as I say, maybe I don't understand what you
mean by modular...
-- 
Mike Maxwell
Boeing Advanced Technology Center
	...uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm