Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!harnad From: harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Summary: On various varieties of incorrigibility Message-ID: Date: 2 Mar 89 06:19:32 GMT References: <3351@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 128 lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) of University of Hawaii wrote: " Harnad says there's a "true" sense of 'understand' with " respect to which we should agree with Searle's terminological " argument. Maybe so. I don't think so, but even if I'm wrong, " and Searle has done some first rate linguistics here, the main " point seems to have been established. There is no substance to " the Chinese Room argument -- it's just toying with words. It's amazing to me how trapped people can be in their preconceptions. IF Searle's is just a terminological point THEN he is indeed just toying with words. But if there exists a real experience, called understanding (vs. not understanding) a language, an experience we all have, and know perfectly well that we have, and can perfectly well recognize when we do and don't have, then Searle's is by no means just a terminological point or word-play, and he is not doing any kind of lingustics here, first-rate or otherwise. Now I keep trying to remind people (who have managed to forget or not notice) that this simple, familiar, sufficiently unambiguous EXPERIENCE of understanding is the only thing whose presence or absence is at issue in the Chinese Room Argument. Forget about terminology. Call it whatever you like. Searle's saying he has it with English and not Chinese. This is no more a linguistic matter than "My left side aches and my right side doesn't"! " you keep citing (purported) facts about language usage and giving " linguistic analyses to support your views. At least, if the analyses " you give are intended to have any empirical content, I don't see how " else they can be construed. If I remind you what you mean be "My left side aches and my right side doesn't," I am not giving a "linguistic analysis." I can't avoid that a verbal discussion should be in words, but we are not discussing words, we're discussing their referents, and in this case these are subjective experiences. Facts about subjective experience are empirical too. " When you propose this distinction of yours between understanding " (subjective) and understanding (objective), how are we to take this?... " you seem to think... there really *is* a distinction of the sort you " claim, and that it's a matter to which some sort of factual evidence is " relevant. And the only evidence you offer concerns language usage, so " when you say it's "simply not a linguistic matter", how can we believe " you? You're simply wrong. It's a peculiar feature of coherent, substantive distinctions that "there really *is* a distinction" there. In this case it's between two "things," both called by the name "understanding." One of them is the experience that we were discussing: Those of us who have not bought into a contemporary ideology (and the rest of us before they bought into the ideology) knew perfectly well what it was like to understand or not understand a language, from the first-person standpoint. That's (subjective) understanding. We also distinguished objective features that tended to accompany this subjective understanding, in ourselves and in others too, and we called that understanding (objective) too: I know what it's like to (subjectively) understand English (and so do you). And he speaks and acts AS IF he (objectively) understands English. The empirical evidence for the existence of the former is our 1st-person subjective sense of what it's like to understand English. The empirical evidence for the existence of the latter is the objective verbal and behavioral data that tend to accompany the former and that we take to constitute expressions of objective understanding. I could do exactly the same (nonlinguistic) number on the distinction between pain and tissue damage, or, for that matter, the distinction between a left- and a right-sided ache. " If [the distinction] is intended to be empirical, and facts other than " those of language usage can be found to suppport it, then it's time for " you to say what those facts are. Until then, I guess we'll continue to " talk linguistics. See above. (Or perhaps I should say "look at" the above, for I can only make you do the objective thing, not the subjective one. -- I am, by the way, striving for an OBJECTIVE understanding of the points I'm making on your part, not just the subjective sense of it...) " There are several interesting things about... "I'm in pain and he is " too" but they are susceptible to linguistic analysis, and they have " nothing to do with 'pain' being "experiential"... The several things you go on to mention (about Mary, and her steak, and syntactic scope) may indeed be interesting, and they certainly are linguistic, but they are not RELEVANT, because, as I have been suggesting to no avail: This is not a syntactic matter! And the relevant part has everything to do with pain being experiential. " 'I seem to be in pain' is a perfectly ordinary thing to say... " can we take a survey to settle the matter? Do you really think that the deep issues involved in the problem of the incorrigibility of subjective experience reduce to a question about an idiom, about which we can take a survey? Maybe if I spell it out for you: "It is true that it feels as if I have a splitting headache right now, but then maybe it's not true that it feels as if I have a splitting headache right now." THAT's what's at issue when I say "I only SEEM [stress] to be in pain." (Does the "only" plus the stress on the "seem" help dispel the inclination to resort to your idiom again?) And I repeat: I'm not doing a linguistic analysis here. I'm talking about the "empirical evidence" for pain: It comes in an incorrigible subjective package. The word-play seems to be [sic] on your end; but mostly what you are doing is begging the question and changing the subject (to linguistics). " I haven't the foggiest idea of what mixing up you are referring to... " [in the claim that in a later posting Lee mixes up the syntax of the " (putative) symbolic "language of thought" -- whose existence and nature " is what is at issue here -- and the syntax of natural languages] I'm " reasonably sure I never said anything about a "language of thought". " What are you talking about? Searle's Argument is about whether thinking is just formal symbol-manipulation in the (purely syntactic) "language of thought." In another posting, as in this one, you digressed into irrelevant matters concerning English syntax. One way to make a self-fulfilling prophecy of the claim that Searle's Argument is just linguistic is to treat it only as linguistic. Well you could have gone further, ignoring its content completely, and only correcting his grammar... -- 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