Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!humu!uhccux!lee From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Message-ID: <3369@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> Date: 3 Mar 89 20:52:54 GMT References: Organization: University of Hawaii Lines: 31 From article , by harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad): " ... " It's amazing to me how trapped people can be in their preconceptions. I confess. It's just this silly Yale-propagated ideology 'science' that gave me this urge to seek theory + evidence lurking somewhere behind your words. I think I'm getting on the right wavelength though, at last. " ... " 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. Yes, I think you could. Let me test my understanding by giving it a try myself, but I'll choose a different example. There's a difference, I shall claim, a real substantive distinction, between understanding-in-the-morning and understanding-in-the-afternoon. What's my evidence? Consider "I finally understood Harnad at 3pm." The word 'understood' here cannot mean understood-in-the-morning. That seems very clear (clearer even than the "I don't seem to be in pain" example). Does this have to do with the language category of the phrase 'at 3pm'? No, since it is straightforward to construct similar examples with different syntactic structure. It has to do with the *reference* of 'at 3pm'. So it's not linguistic. Say, I could get to like this kind of theory. So much easier to find evidence! Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu