Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!harnad From: harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Summary: Understanding is not a definitional matter: Just point to it! Message-ID: Date: 19 Feb 89 23:25:27 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <51123@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 63 engelson@cs.yale.edu (Sean Engelson) of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-2158 asks: " for those denying (Searle + rules) understanding of Chinese: What is " your ["effective"] definition of "understanding"... one that does not " beg the question... by defining understanding to be " symbol-processing or... that which humans do. Is anyone reading or understanding these postings? Or thinking about what this is all about? As I've indicated repeatedly, this is NOT a definitional issue! All I have to do is POINT to positive and negative instances! Before you went to graduate school in computer science at Yale, if I had said to you, "Look, you understand English, you don't understand Chinese, correct?" You would have said, "Sure," and you would have been right. Nobody would have had to define understanding, "effectively" or otherwise; and no questions would have been begged. In fact, nobody COULD have defined understanding, then or now, because we still don't know what it is, functionally speaking; finding out what it is and how it works is going to be cognitive science's empirical mission for some time to come. But we can certainly still POINT to understanding , when it's there; and say it isn't there, when it isn't. Now you're in graduate school at Yale, and you aren't so sure about that. Are you sure you're wiser than before? (Please don't reply with a string of cases where degree of understanding is ambiguous; they've already been brought up repeatedly in this discussion before, and I've replied. In a word, they're irrelevant. And don't reply with analogies to other disciplines in which graduate school was right to make you doubt your prescientific intuitions. There has been no science here yet, just promises and hand-waving.) Understanding is what is "+" of Searle (and you) with respect to English, and "-" with respect to Searle (and you, and the computer running the program he's executing) with respect to Chinese. Lacking any other evidence for "+" on the computer's behalf, that makes the score on understanding: Searle 1, computer 0. [This is the negative note on which Searle's Argument ended in 1980; not to leave it at that, let me add that in "Minds, Machines and Searle" (1989) I've tried to take it further in a positive direction, showing that it's only the symbolic approach to modeling the mind that's vulnerable to Searle's Argument; nonsymbolic and hybrid symbolic/nonsymbolic models are not. And in "Categorical Perception" (1987) I have sketched how symbolic representations could be grounded bottom-up in nonsymbolic (analog and categorical) representations. Now, being immune to Searle's argument doesn't guarantee that a model has captured understanding, of course (nor does it "effectively define" understanding). But it does perhaps correct the misapprehension that the validity of Searle's argument (and it IS valid) would entail that NO model could understand; perhaps this misapprehension is behind the strained, implausible and incoherent counterarguments people have tried to float under the general banner of the "Systems Reply." You don't have to give up on "systems". Just give up on purely symbolic systems.] -- Stevan Harnad INTERNET: harnad@confidence.princeton.edu harnad@princeton.edu srh@flash.bellcore.com harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu harnad@princeton.uucp BITNET: harnad@pucc.bitnet CSNET: harnad%princeton.edu@relay.cs.net (609)-921-7771