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From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: The symbol grounding problem: Correction re. Approximationism
Message-ID: <2237@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 1-Jul-87 21:19:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: mmintl.2237
Posted: Wed Jul  1 21:19:35 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Jul-87 13:20:34 EDT
References: <764@mind.UUCP> <768@mind.UUCP> <770@mind.UUCP> <6174@diamond.BBN.COM> <1172@houdi.UUCP> <923@mind.UUCP>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT.
Lines: 21
Xref: mnetor comp.ai:607 comp.cog-eng:176

In article <923@mind.UUCP> harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) writes:
|In responding to Cugini and Brilliant I misinterpreted a point that
|the former had made and the latter reiterated. It's a point that's
|come up before: What if the iconic representation -- the one that's
|supposed to be invertible -- fails to preserve some objective property
|of the sensory projection? For example, what if yellow and blue at the
|receptor go into green at the icon? The reply is that an analog
|representation is only analog in what it preserves, not in what it fails
|to preserve.

I'm afraid when I parse this, using the definitions Harnad uses, it comes
out as tautologically true of *all* representations.

"Analog" means "invertible".  The invertible properties of a representation
are those properties which it preserves.  Is there some strange meaning of
"preserve" being used here?  Otherwise, I don't see how this statement has
any meaning.
-- 

Frank Adams                           ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Ashton-Tate          52 Oakland Ave North         E. Hartford, CT 06108