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From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Message-ID: <2717@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 27 Nov 88 19:35:49 GMT
References: <1976@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 28

From article <1976@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>, by gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton):
"    ....  I regard all symbol systems as effectively logocentric.

Would you tell us why *we* should?  E.g., taking a look at some axiom
sets for symbolic logic, it is less than obvious that prescribing
the meanings of words is what is going on.

"    Intelligence can only be acquired in social situations, since its
"    presence is only acknowledged in social situations.

whoops.

"    The meanings
"    are fluid, and will only be accepted (or contested) by humans in
"    social contexts.  AI folk can do what they want, but no one will
"    ever buy their distortions, nor can they ever have any grounds for
"    convincement in this case.

As applied to the meaning of 'intelligence', there seems to be a
kind of contradiction here.  "Noone will ever buy their distortions"
translates to "language use ascribing intelligence to computers
will never come to be regarded as fair play in the language game."
If we accept the translation, we see that the thesis is obviously
false, since language has already come to be used this way.  Listen
around. "Dumb program!"  "If you put the name in quotes, the
computer will understand you." ...

		Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu