Path: utzoo!dciem!client1!mmt
From: mmt@client1.dciem.dnd.ca (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument
Message-ID: <1465@client1.dciem.dnd.ca>
Date: 25 Feb 89 18:26:24 GMT
Article-I.D.: client1.1465
References: <Feb.20.20.51.31.1989.15876@elbereth.rutgers.edu> <3305@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <Feb.22.01.03.30.1989.19132@elbereth.rutgers.edu25 Feb 89 18:26:24 GMT
Reply-To: mmt@client1.dciem.dnd.ca (Martin Taylor)
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 43


-- 
--There are two senses of "understand," a subjective and an objective
--one. The first (1) is what I mean when I say "I understand English" and
--the second (2) is what I mean when I say "He understands English." The
--first is primary. What I say and mean by "I understand" is based on
--direct, incorrigible, first-person evidence. When I say "HE
--understands," I am merely INFERRING that what's true of him is the same
--thing that's true of me when I understand. I can be WRONG (very wrong)
--about (2) but not about (1). It is (1) that is at issue in Searle's
--Argument, though people keep conflating it with (2).
-- 
--That's all there is to it. (Stevan Harnad)

You may perhaps be correct of yourself when you claim "I understand English"
but you cannot know you are correct when you say "I understand what you
just said in English" even though your subjective impression is that you
understood.  You therefore cannot claim "I understand statements written
(spoken) in English," which I think is close to what "I understand English"
means.  The best you can do, I think, is to go by analogy to Harnad's
arguments on categorization--behaviourally your responses to statements
in English have usually had the expected effect on the person making the
statement, so you interpret the feedback as indicating that you did indeed
understand.  Just as miscategorization is determined by unexpected feedback
from the world, so misunderstanding is determined by unexpected feedback
from a communicating partner.  You cannot, by yourself, determine that
you understand. It's just a feeling, untested.

There is a close analogy in psychophysics.  Ask someone "Did you hear that
tone" and you will get an answer that (presumably) corresponds to the
subjective experience of hearing the tone.  But put them in an experiment,
in which they must determine which of two intervals contained the test tone,
and they will get moderately high scores, well above chance, under conditions
in which they may say "I didn't hear more than two or three of those."
Similarly, in experiments in which they must say simply whether a tone
was in a single interval, they will say "Yes" on many intervals in which
a tone was not presented.  The subjective impression does not correspond
to the objective event of hearing, any more than the subjective impression
of understanding corresponds to the objective event of understanding.
-- 
Martin Taylor (mmt@zorac.dciem.dnd.ca ...!uunet!dciem!mmt) (416) 635-2048
If the universe transcends formal methods, it might be interesting.
     (Steven Ryan).