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: Chinese Room argument Summary: Are there perceptual and (natural-language) semantic "duals" that leave syntax and behavior invariant (inverted spectra, radically underdetermined translations)? Message-ID: Date: 7 Mar 89 21:52:14 GMT References: <2125@star.cs.vu.nl> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 57 There has been a certain amount of euphoria about my statement that no respondent has so far given evidence of having adequately understood Searle's Argument or my own. Don't get carried away. The respondents (and they are for the most part the same small number of people, coming back over and over again) are, after all, the ones who continue to disagree. And on all the evidence I have seen, it is because they haven't grasped the points being made (though some progress has been made, and acknowledged, in a few cases). Now, I have no way of confirming it, but it is not unlikely that among the much larger number of people who have been READING these discussions, but not participating in them, there are a few who have understood. In any case, I think I may even have found an active participant who has done so: roelw@cs.vu.nl (Roel Wieringa) of Dept. of Math. & Comp. Science, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam wrote: " it is possible for the programmers, users. etc. to change the " denotation without affecting the output of the computations... " Read any textbook on formal languages or logic and you will find a " clean separation between the syntax and semantics of a language. " Whether we can make sense of the output of a symbol-manipulation " process is completely irrelevant to the rules of symbol-manipulation. Agreement is uninteresting and uninformative, however, so let me ask Roel Wieringa about the following potential objection (which I have made in a paper in preparation called "The Origin of Words"): Philosophers have made two kinds of nondemonstrative conjectures about "swapping." One was about swapping experiences (the "inverted spectrum" conjecture: could someone among us pass indistinguishably even though whenever he saw or spoke of what we refer to as "green" he actually saw what we refer to as "red" and vice versa). The second "swapping" conjecture is about meaning: Could the meanings of some (or all) of the words in a natural language be coherently swapped or permuted while leaving ALL behavior and discourse unchanged? (This is Quine's celebrated thesis of the "underdetermination of radical translation.") I feel logical and intuitive pulls in both directions in both cases. Certainly in a toy domain or a circumscribed artificial language you could show that there were semantic "duals" under which the entire domain was syntactically invariant. (How many? A few? A finite number? An infinite number?) But does this make sense for ALL of perception and its accompanying behavior and judgments (in the inverted-spectrum case) and for a full natural language and ALL possible discourse and behavior (in the swapped-meaning case)? (If so, how many duals might there be? And is there a way of proving this.) I don't think it's NECESSARY for the case against symbolic functionalism that the answer be "Yes, swapping is always possible," but obviously it wouldn't hurt. What do you think? -- 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